Explosions, thick black smoke. And finally, more than 250 million dollars in smoke. The explosion of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle and its payload, the Israeli satellite Amos-6, is a blow to the American troublemaker of SpaceX space. The accident took place on 1 st September morning classes on the firing of the rocket at Cape Canaveral (Florida), during a static test routine prior to the launch, which was take place on 3 September. The group confirmed the explosion in a terse statement: “SpaceX can confirm that in preparing a static test, there was a bug on the shooting that resulted in the loss of the launcher and its payload . ” No injuries were reported.
While the company Elon Musk has seen others. She was able to recover after the explosion of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle flight June 28, 2015, which saw the loss of a Dragon cargo capsule for the International Space Station. But today’s accident is not trivial. The inevitable investigating the cause of the explosion could, if responsibility for SpaceX is revealed, forcing the California group to push the next shooting his pitcher. New launches were planned before the end of the year, the first firing of a Falcon 9 rocket “reused”, which was put into orbit the SES-10 satellite for Luxembourg operator SES. SpaceX had also launch communications satellites Iridium Next, a cargo freighter for NASA or a Korean satellite.
Second explosion in 18 months
The other risk induced by explosion regard to insurance. In case of proven fault SpaceX launches insurance premiums of US society are likely to increase, which will impact its competitiveness against competitors (Ariane 5, ILS / Proton). The explosion, the second in 18 months for Falcon 9, also could again cast doubt on the reliability of the launch vehicle, even as SpaceX had managed nine consecutive launches since December 2015, and successfully recovered the first floor of its pitching six times.
SpaceX is far from the only player affected by the explosion. The satellite’s owner, Israeli operator Spacecom, loses a plaything of 5.5 tonnes estimated at $ 200 million. Facebook and the European operator Eutelsat will also make a wry face: they had signed an agreement with Spacecom in October 2015 to use the bandwidth of Amos-6. The idea was to expand access to broadband Internet about fifteen African countries, including much of the west coast (Nigeria, Ghana), East (Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia) and South Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe).
impact of 50 million euros for Eutelsat
in a statement, Eutelsat has estimated the financial impact of the satellite loss to “about 5 million for the 2016-17 fiscal year, 15 million for the 2017-18 fiscal year and between 25 and 30 million euros for the year 2018-19″, an fifty million euros in all. The group ensures that it is committed “to continue the development of broadband in Africa.” and that it “will consider other options to serve the needs of key customers, upstream of HTS launch of Eutelsat satellite, scheduled for 2019, designed to offer broadband services in Africa”.
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