Elon Musk: SpaceX crash data ‘difficult to interpret’

Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, says the company is still piecing together the events that led to one of the firm’s rockets breaking apart during a flight last month.

“We are putting together a super-detailed timeline and making sure we have a precise sequence,” Musk said Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. “In this case the data does seem to be quite difficult to interpret. Whatever happened is not a simple, straightforward thing.”

{mosads}The timeline, he said, will pinpoint events down to the millisecond.

Musk reportedly said that he is hoping the company will have a preliminary report on the accident by the end of the week.

A SpaceX rocket carrying supplies for the International Space Station broke up a little over two minutes into the June 28 flight. It was the third accident involving a supply mission to the station since October.

SpaceX has a contract with NASA to run supply missions to the space station. It recently received the right to compete for military launch contracts as well.

The June flight was supposed to be the third test of the rocket’s ability to land on a ship, making is reusable. In the past, rockets have struggled to land on the floating platform.

NASA ultimately plans to start sending astronauts to space using American, rather than Russian, vehicles — optimistically by 2017.