CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Nearly two weeks after a fiery explosion during a ground test of its new crew capsule, SpaceX confirmed on Thursday, May 2, that the vehicle was destroyed, but neither the company nor NASA, its primary customer, have publicly acknowledged the nature of the mishap.
Instead, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reliability for California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp, known as SpaceX, continued to refer to the accident simply as an “anomaly”—science jargon for when something goes wrong.
