Last month, SpaceX lost one of its powerful Falcon 9 rockets and payloads in a fiery explosion that occurred while it was prepping fuel tanks for a rocket test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

In a statement posted online Friday afternoon, the company said it has been able to replicate the failure of a critical component, and said it is still investigating what caused the component to fail. The company says it is already working on a potential fix to what it called "loading conditions," and plans to resume testing the rocket stage in the coming days.

"This is an important milestone on the path to returning to flight," the statement said.

The explosion was the second such incident in the last two years. Immediately after the incident, the company partnered with officials from three federal agencies to investigate the cause of the explosion.

Nobody was hurt in the explosion. But the incident raised questions around the safety and capabilities of one of the leading players in the commercial spaceflight industry.

SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company founded by billionaire technology executive Elon Musk, has been launching rockets to ferry commercial satellites into orbit around the Earth. The company has delivered cargo to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA and is under contract to one day transport humans there. SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk hopes one day to fly rockets to Mars.

The investigation took a surprising turn when SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk took to Twitter calling it the "most difficult and complex failure we have ever had in 14 years." He said a mysterious "bang" sound occurred seconds before the explosion.

[Related: Implication of sabotage adds intrigue to SpaceX investigation]

The explosion became a flashpoint in a contract dispute, when the chief executive of a rival company penned a letter to Pentagon officials asking them to take the explosion into account when evaluating SpaceX's past performance. Members of Congress joined the fray last month when a group of Republican senators questioned the company's safety credentials in a letter to federal officials, and a separate bi-partisan group of 24 congressmen came out in support of the company.

The statement posted Thursday said the company planned to return to flight "by the end of the year."