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SpaceX, NASA react to rocket fail and will ‘get back to flight’

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, carrying to bring food and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), exploded minutes after launch on Sunday morning. This is the third cargo mission to the space station to be lost in recent months.

NASA video of the Falcon 9 rocket liftoff before the explosion

Later in the day, NASA hosted a news conference to answer questions about the event and the future of space missions.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX President and COO, present by phone said that “an anomaly” caused pressure problems during the second stage of launch. Shotwell added that SpaceX will provide a more information once they the collect telemetry data, including video recording’s from the Dragon space capsule.

When asked about the timeline to “get back to flight,” Shotwell was unable to give a specific schedule, but said the time is not far off, “not a year, a number of months.”

Shotwell would not comment on SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s tweet that “there was an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank.”

Shotwell would not comment on the cost of to current expedition, “We do not talk about costs publicly.”

The Falcon 9 was meant to bring food and supplies to the International Space Station where American Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts are spending a year in space.

“Space flight is not easy,” said Bill “Gerst” Gerstenmaier, Associate Administrator Human Exploration and Operations at NASA, “SpaceX team did everything right.”

The failure is the third involving an ISS cargo mission in eight months, Space News reported.

Gerstenmaier denied any connection between the three failed cargo missions. “We expected to lose commercial vehicles. Did not expect to lose all of them, but we have.”

No planned space flights to the ISS, including one slated on July 3, have been delayed. NASA will “get back to flight” and “keep moving forward and doing the research,” said Gerstenmaier.

Michael Suffredini, Manager of NASA’s International Space Station Program, offered reassurance that the astronauts are in no danger of running out of food or water. The destroyed water filtration system will take time to rebuild is not an immediate necessity. The current yearlong space mission is supposed to end in March 2016.

Suffredini showed motion as he answered question about a school research project that had been on the last failed cargo mission, and then remade only to be destroyed again. He said it was a “life lesson” and NASA would get the project back online.

The news conference was shown via livestream on the SpaceX and NASA websites.

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