
Two weeks after the explosion that caused Falcon 9 rocket to delay its launch, SpaceX claim it will only take two months to launch again.
In early September, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX hit a bump in the road when its Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames at the launch site at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, but the CEO has now announced they are planning to relaunch as early as November.
The delay has caused a headache for SpaceX as the launch was heavily invested into by Facebook and Eutelsat in order to take the Amos 6 Israeli communications satellite but only three months after the explosion they are hoping to go head with a second attempt.
Despite the quick restart, SpaceX hasn’t revealed what types of repair has been needed to fix the Falcon 9 or how much the damage cost the space agency. What we do know is that the Amos 6 was completely destroyed in the explosion on Sept. 1.
However, according to Paulo Lozano, a researcher at MIT’s Space Propulsion Lab mentions in a report by Popular Science, it is all dependant on how long it takes to figure out what happened on Sept 1. and the complexity of what caused the explosion prompting skepticism at the speed of which SpaceX can claim to relaunch.
“If a turbo pump in the rocket engine fails, it could take months or years to recover from a failure like that. It’s not the same as something simple like a leaking valve. The timeline is going to depend on the complexity of this particular case. Then, once you have a solution, you have to do testing, evaluation, modeling, and at the end you have to prove to yourself and the world that this is not going to happen again.”
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