On Tuesday, Space Exploration aborted the engine test of its Falcon 9 rocket, which will eventually fly cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
The company planned to fired up the engines at its Cape Canaveral, Florida launch site, where the rocket is being prepped and readied for a company-sponsored demonstration flight in the coming months.
The test was aborted just two seconds before engine ignition.
A NASA video camera showed flames and small puffs of smoke around the base of the rocket.
Space Exploration Technologies said in a statement that the flames were from the burn-off of liquid oxygen and kerosene.
“Given that this was our first abort event on this pad, we decided to scrub for the day to get a good look at the rocket before trying again. Everything looks great at first glance,” spokeswoman Emily Shanklin said in an e-mail to Reuters.
The rocket lies just south of the space shuttle launch pads at the Kennedy Space Center on a refurbished oceanside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
SpaceX is building launch vehicles and spacecraft to fill the void that will be left when the government-run space shuttles are retired.
The company has 15 Falcon 9 contracts with NASA, 12 of which are cargo resupply missions to the space station. The contracts are worth about $1.9 billion.
Options for additional flights for cargo-deliver would help the contract be valued at over $3 billion.
President Barack Obama plans to add $6 billion to NASA’s budget over the next five years to help develop space taxis, which would transport astronauts to and from the space station.
NASA has already turned over station crew transportation to Russia with the space shuttle fleets planned retirement later on this year. Russia charges the United States about $51 million per seat for rides on its Soyuz rockets to the ISS.
NASA has divided up its commercial rocket development and cargo delivery services with SpaceX and Virginia-based Orbital Science Corp., which has plans to debut its Taurus II rocket and Cygnus spacecraft sometime before April 2011.
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