FRANCISCO: The planned launch of an unmanned Falcon 9 rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX was cancelled minutes before liftoff Tuesday because of strong upper-level winds.
“Extreme wind shear over Cape Canaveral,” Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., tweeted earlier. “Feels like a sledgehammer when supersonic in the vertical. Hope it changes.”
The Falcon 9 was to carry DSCOVR, a refrigerator-sized satellite intended to monitor solar weather that is a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US Air Force.
Mission control called a “no go” minutes before the scheduled 6:05 pm launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Tuesday marked the second time the launch had been scrubbed. A liftoff planned 8 Feburary was pushed back because of issues with Air Force radar tracking. In addition to the DSCOVR mission, SpaceX is attempting to land its first-stage rocket booster on a barge in the ocean, a critical step toward being able to reuse the company’s rockets. Tuesday was a busy day for the company. Dragon, its cargo spacecraft, was released from the International Space Station’s robotic arm at 2:10 pm New York time and splashed down more than five hours later in the Pacific Ocean, southwest of Long Beach, California, the company said in a Twitter posting.
