Image of SpaceX Falcon 9 Explosion. Image taken from USA Today footage embedded below.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its way to the ISS. Ironically, the last message by flight communication announced that “Coming back shows vehicle on course and on track.”
The message was shortly followed with: “We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure.”
Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX noted that nothing stood out to be different to the previous successful flights. She also mentioned that the first stage of the Falcon 9 flight was successful until 139 seconds into the flight. At this point communication with the Falcon rocket was lost, however telemetry from the dragon capsule continued to come in. The incident is currently classified as a mishap.
“The first stage flight remained nominal,” said Shotwell. “We do not expect this to have been a first stage issue. We saw some pressurization within the second phase, which we will be tracking down.” However, Shotwell would not comment on if this was the cause.
However, Elon Musk did tweet the following:
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.
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
NASA, SpaceX and the FAA will continue to look over the data and video to determine a cause. Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of Mission Assurance at SpaceX is in charge of the investigation. There is no indication of safety concerns to the public or operations.
The rocket launched from Cape Canaveral on the coast of Florida, with the explosion occurring over the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX and NASA leaders do not anticipate the incident will affect the timeline for crew-based testing of the Dragon/Falcon system.
“This learning can actually expedite things,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administration of NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. “We can learn from this failure, understand a weakness or flaw in the design we might not have seen for a while. This can actually lower speculation about how to move forward and work on crew design.”
It’s been a Bad Year
The loss of the Falcon rocket is the third commercial flight in recent memory to be lost. “We expected through the commercial cargo program that we would lose some vehicles. I didn’t think we would lose them all within a one year time frame, but we have.” said Gerstenmaier.
“SpaceX has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in its first six cargo resupply missions to the station and we know they can replicate that success,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “We will work with and support SpaceX to assess what happened, understand the specifics of the failure and correct it to move forward. This is a reminder that spaceflight is an incredible challenge, but we learn from each success and each setback. Today's launch attempt will not deter us from our ambitious human spaceflight program.”
No Lives But Valuable Equipment Lost
“We are disappointed in the loss of the latest SpaceX cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station,” said Bolden. “However, the astronauts are safe aboard the station and have sufficient supplies for the next several months. We will work closely with SpaceX to understand what happened, fix the problem and return to flight. The commercial cargo program was designed to accommodate loss of cargo vehicles. We will continue operation of the station in a safe and effective way as we continue to use it as our test bed for preparing for longer duration missions farther into the solar system."
However, Gerstenmaier did mention that the crew on the ISS will need to monitor a water filtration system which was to be resupplied during this SpaceX mission.
“This is a blow to us,” said Gerstenmaier, “we lost a lot of important research equipment on this flight.” Some of the equipment included on the flight included a space suite, a new docking adapter mechanism and a lot of research.
Shotwell mentioned that the escape system that will be included in the second version of Dragon would have saved the equipment in an incident similar to this one.
To that end, other resupply and progress missions are scheduled for July 3rd, August, and later within the year. Additionally, there is a crew flight scheduled for July 23rd.