In the winter of 2010, the private aerospace company SpaceX was set to launch a capsule as a demonstration for NASA, hoping to prove that it could, someday, deliver supplies to the International Space Station. When engineers inspected the Falcon 9 rocket just days before takeoff, they discovered a crack on an engine nozzle. Dismantling the hardware, fixing the faulty piece, and putting it all back together would take weeks, and officials at SpaceX didn't want to wait that long.
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