The SpaceX explosion on Sunday had people questioning the possibility of pushing forth with the plans for commercial space travel by 2017, but NASA firmly believes that the incident will not affect the plans for space tourism in the next years.
The Federal Aviation Administration is doing an investigation to get to the bottom of the incident. SpaceX's next Falcon 9 flight, which was scheduled for August and would deliver the Jason-3 Earth observation satellite into orbit, has now been postponed said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), according to Paste Magazine.
NASA still believes that they will be ready for commercial space exploration by 2017.
"That timeline is still achievable for SpaceX despite Sunday's mishap," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations. "We can actually learn from this failure - understand a weakness or a flaw in the design that we might not have seen for a while, and so this could actually lower some of the speculation about how we want to move forward and how we want to work on the crew design. At this point, I don't anticipate it impacting the schedule. In fact, it could help us to nail down designs and move forward," Gerstenmaier said in a press briefing Sunday, according to Fox News.
The estimated cost of a seat in a future space taxi: $70 million.
