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An unmanned SpaceX rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station broke apart Sunday shortly after liftoff. It was a severe blow to NASA, the third cargo mission to fail in eight months.
The accident happened about 2½ minutes into the flight from Cape Canaveral, Fla. A billowing white cloud emerged in the sky, growing bigger and bigger, then fiery plumes shot out. Pieces of the rocket could be seen falling into the Atlantic Ocean like a fireworks display gone wrong.
More than 5,200 pounds of space station cargo was on board, including the first docking port designed for future commercial crew capsules, a new spacesuit and a water filtration system.
NASA officials said they have enough supplies for the three-person crew on board the station to last till October and still plan to send three more crew members up in a late July launch. NASA likes to have a six-month cushion of food and water, but is now down to four months.
"We're good from a food and water standpoint," said NASA's top spaceflight official, William Gerstenmaier, at a press conference.
This puts added pressure on another resupply launch scheduled for Friday by Russia, its first attempt since losing a supply capsule in April.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket shattered while traveling at 2,900 mph, about 27 miles up. Everything seemed to be going well until the rocket went supersonic.
"We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure," announced NASA commentator George Diller.
Data stopped flowing from the Falcon 9 rocket around 2 minutes and 19 seconds, he said.
SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk later said that the pressure got too high in the liquid-oxygen tank of the rocket's upper stage.
"That's all we can say with confidence right now," Musk said via Twitter.
The private company is in charge of the accident investigation, with oversight from the Federal Aviation Administration, which licensed the flight.
The Dragon capsule, which is designed to eventually carry people, still sent signals to the ground after the rocket broke apart, said SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. Had astronauts been on board, a still-being tested abort system would have whisked them away to safety in such a mishap, she said.
SpaceX hopes to launch astronauts from U.S. soil again aboard the Falcon-Dragon combination in December 2017. They still can make that target, Shotwell said. Now, NASA buys seats from Russia to get astronauts to the orbiting lab.
Shotwell assured reporters that the California-based company will fix the problem "and get back to flight."
Losing this shipment — which included replacements for items lost in the two earlier failed supply flights — was a huge setback for NASA.
"This is a blow to us," Gerstenmaier said, citing the docking port, spacesuit and considerable scientific research that had been on board. He said there was nothing common among the three accidents, "other than it's space and it's difficult to go fly."
In April, a Russian cargo ship spun out of control and burned up upon re-entry. And last October, an Orbital Sciences Corp. capsule was destroyed in a launch accident in Virginia. Orbital Sciences and SpaceX have NASA contracts to ship cargo.