SpaceX was sending an unmanned cargo ship called the Falcon 9 rocket to the international space station yesterday but shortly after launch it exploded. The rockets countdown and launch went quite smoothly, however the incident occurred after 2 minutes of flight. It was carrying 4,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts aboard the ISS to help carry out research as well as one of two new docking adapters that would have provided docking ports for future arrivals.
Shortly after the explosion the CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk tweeted.
There was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank. Data suggests counterintuitive cause.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 28, 2015
However the cause of this malfunction is still unknown, leaving the SpaceX team with a lot of data to pour over in order to figure out what happened to the Falcon 9 rocket. Early this morning Elon Musk tweeted this:
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
While there have been a number of failed space launches recently, one last October and another last April, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations said “There’s really no commonality across these three events other than the fact that it’s space, and it’s difficult to go fly.” This is the 3rd cargo ship to malfunction in the last 8 months, however no astronauts in space are at risk. Typically the Space Station Managers keep six months supplies in reserve to account for weather setbacks.
There is another launch scheduled for the 23rd of July that will be carrying 3 more astronauts to the ISS to help conduct research, bringing the total amount to 6. In order to make this trip safer, Russian engineers have replaced a section of the rocket with an older and more thoroughly tested version which has been on fights before. Currently there are not enough scientists onboard the ISS to carry out the workload that they are presented with, there is too much research to be carried out and too few people to do it. Mr. Gerstenmaier went on to say
“There’s not enough crew members on orbit with enough hours in the day to actually do the research we’ve got there,” he said. “We’re in space to do something, and that’s to do research.”
We will continue to post updates on this story as it develops.