Here's when SpaceX will announce its next historic rocket launch
Until then, SpaceX had a flawless launch record for its Falcon 9, which had successfully completed 17 missions since June 2010.
Understandably, the company quickly halted future Falcon 9 launches scheduled for late this summer and early fall, and we've been wondering when the company will, once again, fire up its rocket engines to space.
It now looks like things are taking longer than expected to get up to speed, prolonging the company's next launch by at least "a couple of more months," SpaceX president, Gwynne Shotwell, said during a space conference on Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal.
"We're taking more time than we originally envisioned to get back to flight," Shotwell said during the conference. "But I don't think any of our customers wants us to race to the cliff and fail again."
About a month after the explosion SpaceX announced that the likely cause was a single, faulty support strut that broke during mid-launch. Unlike most of the parts that make up SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, the support strut was not made in house but rather supplied by another company, which Musk would not identify.
Part of what's taking so long is that the company is taking a deep look at their supply chain to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't happen again.
The next launch
These pricey contracts are something NASA was hoping to avoid with help from commercial companies like SpaceX and Boeing. But within the last year, both companies have suffered a tragic rocket explosion.
At Monday's space conference, SpaceX officials said that the company plans to submit a detailed report about the Falcon 9 rocket explosion by September or October of this year.
SpaceX could announce its next launch date a few weeks after that, according to The Wall Street Journal.
These rocket explosions, however, are not the main obstacle America faces to finally begin launching its astronauts from home soil, once again, NASA's administrator Charles Bolden recently said in an opinion article for Wired last week.
"Had Congress adequately funded President Obama's Commercial Crew proposal, we could have been making final preparations this year to once again launch American astronauts to space from American soil aboard American spacecraft," he wrote.