The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that exploded Sunday was in route to the International Space Station with valuable gear from NASA.
“This is not really where I wanted to be on a Sunday afternoon. But spaceflight is not easy, and we don’t want to make light of this. We lost a lot of important research and equipment on this flight. We lost the IDA, a water purifier, and a spacesuit. We have to see how we can recover from that,”said William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s human exploration division associate administrator, in a post-launch briefing.
The three astronauts currently on the space station, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Korneinko, have enough supplies to last them until October, though if it comes down to a 45 day supply they would have to consider bringing the crew back to Earth.
The Falcon9 rocket was carrying two and a half tons of supplies, including a docking adaptor for the “the next generation of crewed spacecraft.”
The Falcon took off at 10:21 am and exploded a little more than two minutes after takeoff.
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This was the third Space Station resupply mission to fail in the last 8 months. Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, tweeted out the following regarding the explosion:
There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015
That’s all we can say with confidence right now. Will have more to say following a thorough fault tree analysis. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015
Cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review. Now parsing data with a hex editor to recover final milliseconds.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2015
According to Gwynee Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX, Falcon9 launches will be suspended for the time-being until the FAA signs off on SpaceX’s investigation of what occurred. This process should take a “number of months.”