The Falcon 9 has seven other missions this year, excluding the ones for AMOS 6 and NASA, and at least three of which have time-bound expectations riding on them.
A SpaceX rocket blew up on its pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, a day before it was set to launch. It was carrying a $200-million Israeli satellite and supplies to the International Space Station. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had tweeted that the explosion was triggered by an issue with the rocket’s upper stage, although final details will take at least six months to emerge. The mishap has many implications for the private space-launch company, most notably for the Israeli satellite-maker Spacecom, SpaceX’s relationship with NASA, its competition with Boeing and its assurances to the wider business community.
There’s also been an implication for Facebook. The social networking company was going to lease some of the bandwidth from the Israeli satellite, AMOS 6, to improve internet connectivity around Africa. However, this loss is relatively minor in comparison to what else SpaceX stands to lose: its reputation of being reliable and state-of-the-art at the same time. In fact, speculations were rife that a new rocket refuelling technique, concerning the upper stage Musk tweeted about, it has been testing since 2015 may come to be implicated in the accident.
The rocket, a Falcon 9, is at the heart of SpaceX’s plans to expand its offerings – up to building a super-heavy launch vehicle and taking humans to Mars within the decade. However, achieving these objectives behooves the company, led by Musk, to constantly innovate and bring launch costs down. Most recently, the company’s engineers have been able to demonstrate that the first stage of the Falcon 9 could return to land on the surface in an upright position after launching the second stage into orbit. The reusability saves SpaceX millions of dollars as well as eliminates the need to build it again for a subsequent mission.
Last year, the innovation also took the form of changing the nature of the propellants carried by the rocket. SpaceX is currently developing its Raptor cryogenic engine. However, unlike other cryogenic engines (including ISRO’s), where oxygen is cooled to really low temperatures at really low pressure, the Raptor will be fed really cold oxygen at really high pressure. The difference is that the oxygen contents in the tank become more dense, allowing the tank to hold more oxygen in a given volume. This in turn frees up space for the fuel (liquid methane), and increases the distance the rocket can travel as well as the amount of payload it can carry. According to SpaceX, the increase in density is of the order of 8%.
However, loading such a mass of oxygen into the tank before each mission has been a recurring problem for SpaceX. In 2014, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying an SES-9 satellite took off only after four failed attempts one week, three of which involved issues with the propellants. Unless SpaceX perfects the attendant techniques, it is going to be neither reliable nor state-of-the-art, at least as far as heavy lift missions are concerned.
Another suspect is the launchpad itself, the one called Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. A video made available by USLaunchReport.com (below) shows extensive damage caused to it by the explosion, including to the strongback, the steel tower supporting the rocket. Such damages typically take many months to fix, and until then that’s one less launchpad for SpaceX. However, if the launchpad had been poorly maintained and if it turns out to be that the explosion was triggered by something on the ground, then SpaceX can deflect criticism away from the Falcon 9. It could also use the nearby Launch Complex 39A, but which will only be ready for use in December 2016.