This morning, Sept 1, Cape Canaveral, Florida was rock when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded at a few minutes after 9 am ET. The rocket had been wheeled out to the launched pad for testing in preparation of this weekends mission. Shortly after re-fueling some yet unexplained mishap occurred to cause the rocket and its payload blow-up.
"Cause
still unknown. More soon," Elon Musk, founder and CEO of both
SpaceX and Tesla Motors, said on Twitter.
Fortunately,
all personal had already been cleared from the launch area so that
there were no injuries. The only casualties of the explosion were the
Amos-6 communication satellite, the Falcon 9 rocket, and the launch
pad.
The
explosion will most likely ground any future SpaceX launches until
the cause and any needed fixes are made. The last time a Falcon 9
exploded was shortly after launch in June
of last year. After that explosion it was 6 months before the
necessary upgrades were made to resume launches. As a result SpaceX
had a much improved Falcon 9 rocket that had 9 successful missions
and 6 recoveries of the first stage.
Today
disaster is also a setback for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his
plan to bring
Internet service to remote areas of Africa. The plan had been in
the works for over a year before Facebook and France-based Eutelsat
paid $95 million dollars on a 5 year lease of the Amos satellite
array.
“We
are disappointed by the loss but remain committed to our mission of
connecting people to the Internet around the world,” a Facebook
spokesperson said in a statement.
Mark Zuckerberg was
in Africa promoting the mission when he heard the news of the
explosion.
“I'm
deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX's launch failure destroyed
our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many
entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” he said in a
Facebook post. “We remain committed to our mission of connecting
everyone, and we will keep working until everyone has the
opportunities this satellite would have provided.”
