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June 28, 2015, 9:27 AM GMT / Updated June 29, 2015, 12:21 AM GMT By Alan Boyle

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket broke up in a fiery blast on Sunday just minutes after its launch with a robotic Dragon cargo capsule headed for the International Space Station. It was the third failure of a space station resupply mission in eight months.

The Falcon took off right on time after a seemingly flawless countdown, rising into the sunny skies over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 10:21 a.m. ET. But a little more than two minutes after liftoff, video showed the Falcon 9 disintegrating.

"We appear to have had a launch vehicle failure," NASA spokesman George Diller observed. Air Force officials said the rocket "experienced an anomaly" 148 seconds into the flight. Debris from the breakup fell into the Atlantic Ocean without causing damage or injury on the ground.

SpaceX billionaire founder Elon Musk, who turned 44 years old on Sunday, reported in a tweet that "there was an overpressure event in the upper-stage liquid oxygen tank."

SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, echoed that preliminary assessment during a news briefing later Sunday — but she said it was too early to say anything else about the cause of the mishap. SpaceX is in charge of the investigation, under the oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration. Shotwell said SpaceX crews were trying to recover debris from the sea.

Falcon launches suspended

Shotwell indicated that Falcon 9 rocket launches would be suspended until the FAA signs off on SpaceX's findings, a process that she said would probably take "a number of months" but not as long as a year. At least three payloads are on the manifest for Falcon 9 launches in the near term, including the Jason 3 ocean-observing satellite and the SES 9 and Orbcomm OG2 telecom satellites.

The primary objective of Sunday's mission was to deliver the Dragon to the space station with more than two and a half tons of supplies, equipment and experiments — ranging from a new docking adapter for accommodating future U.S.-built spaceships to a virtual-reality headset for the station's crew.