Shortly after taking off on Sunday, one of the SpaceX Falcon 9’s exploded. This rocket carried one cargo ship which was going to the International Space Station.
The ship disintegrated just minutes after launching from the Air Force Station at Cape Canaveral. This raised questions on how NASA along with its partners are going to continue supplying this station.
This was the 3rd loss in 7 months of a ship headed into space. However, NASA says that they were prepared for a problem like this and don’t foresee any problems with the functioning of the International space station.
The Falcon 9 rocket took off at 10:21 am and took just two minutes and nineteen seconds before a white cloud appeared around the midsection of the rocket. A little while later, debris started falling into the Atlantic Ocean.
The problem was during the 2nd stage but SpaceX didn’t offer any other details in this regard. They didn’t want to speculate on the incident.
Earlier, there was an Antares rocket which exploded during launch in Virginia. There was also a Russian Progress cargo rocket which lost control and didn’t make it to the space station this April.
But as per the associate administrator for human exploration at NASA, William H. Gerstenmaier, these events were not related in any way apart from being linked to space.
This failure doesn’t signal any concern for Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko, the Russian astronauts and Scott J. Kelly, the American astronaut on the space station. Even though there have been 3 mishaps, the station can still sustain itself till October.
The launching of 3 astronauts on the 23rd of July to take the tally of the station crew to 6 once again isn’t going to be delayed in any way. Gerstenmaier didn’t want the scientific research at the space station to be delayed in any way.
The Falcon 9 had 18 successful launching out of 18 before this mishap.
