SpaceX Rocket Explodes Minutes After Takeoff | Here & Now

Donal McGuinness, managing director of the Irish operations of enterprise transactions firm Escher Group, was on holidays in Florida and on a beach near Cape Canaveral where he could see the rocket’s lift-off.

Pam Underwood of the FAA said the expedition had been conducted under an FAA launch license and the FAA would provide oversight to SpaceX as it tried to work out what had happened. It is still not clear how the disaster occurred.

Two virtual reality headsets to empower astronauts aboard the ISS were part of the supplies on board the SpaceX’s seventh commercial re-supply mission.

With NASA not really in the rocket game at the moment, SpaceX has been tasked with handling some of the space agency’s resupply missions to the global Space Station – and one just went haywire. Normally, NASA likes to have a six-month cushion of food and water, but is now down to four months.

Stored in the capsule’s unpressurized trunk was the first of two new docking rings for the station.

It appears that the first and second stages broke up, followed by an explosion that destroyed the first stage.

Yesterday Musk posted that the cause is still unknown after investing several thousand engineering hours.

“We would be remiss to underestimate the gravity of the situation right now”, said Nelson in a statement..

Shotwell said that this incident is a reminder of how hard working in space is.

The Dragon spacecraft lost on Sunday carried 5,461 pounds (2,477 kg) of food, clothing, equipment and science experiments for the station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 260 miles (420 km) above Earth.

“It gives us a chance to learn an environment where we can tolerate a little more risk and then move forward with the crew environment”, Gerstenmaier said.

As planned, the “Super Draco” rockets separated the Dragon, carrying it over the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA officials urge beachgoers not to pick up any debris. For now, crews at the space station have enough supplies until October.

The rocket malfunction is the third failure to bring supplies to the ISS in the past year, following the crash of a Russian rocket in April and a launch accident of another rocket in October.