SpaceX-NASA’s launch has been postponed to Sunday due to bad weather

NASA on Friday said that the planned launch of a manned SpaceX ship on the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday was to be postponed by one day due to bad weather.

“Due to ground winds and recovery operations, @NASA and @SpaceX are targeting the launch of the Crew-1 mission with astronauts at @Space_Station at 7:27 PM EST on Sunday November 15 (0027 GMT on Monday) NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted.

“Salvage operations” refers to ships that must be moved in place in the event that the mission is interrupted after launch and the crew is forced to dive into the ocean.

Sunday’s launch begins the first of what the United States hopes will become routine missions for SpaceX after a successful test flight in late spring.

That demonstration flight in May was itself the first time a manned mission took off from US soil since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, leaving NASA dependent on Russian rockets for travel to the ISS.

The crew members – three Americans and one Japanese – will fly aboard a Crew Dragon, a space capsule that became the first to be certified by NASA by the Space Shuttle nearly 40 years ago earlier this week.

“The story made this time is that we are launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” Bridenstine told reporters at an earlier press conference.

The Crew Dragon will dock at the space station around 11pm on Monday, November 16.

SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has overtaken its much older rival Boeing, whose program failed after a failed test of its unmanned Starliner.

But SpaceX’s success won’t mean the US will immediately stop buying seats from the Russian space agency, Bridenstine said.

“We want to have an exchange of places where American astronauts can fly on Russian Soyuz rockets and Russian cosmonauts can fly on commercial vehicles,” he said, explaining that it was necessary in the event that one of the programs was inactive for a period of time.

SpaceX has been operating space station refueling flights with the cargo version of the Dragon since 2012.

The next manned mission is expected to take off at the end of March 2021, with one European, one Japanese and two American crew members on board.

ia / ft