Weather postpones NASA, SpaceX historical rocket launch!

Florida, May 28: The historical space launch of Nasa and SpaceX's first-ever mission from US soil to the International Space Station has been scrubbed due to inclement weather along the Atlantic coast of Florida. The decision was taken about 20 minutes before the launch on Wednesday.

 

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed on Twitter that the launch will be delayed until Saturday, stressing "safety for our crew members" is the agency's "top priority."

 

 

The SpaceX control center said they were “not going to quite make it on this,” as the company and NASA decided to call off the day's launch. “Unfortunately, we are not going to launch today,” SpaceX launch director Mike Taylor announced during NASA’s live broadcast.

 

Moreover, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump had arrived in Florida to watch but headed back to the White House once the launch was called off. 

 

 

The next launch has been scheduled on Saturday at 3:22 pm Eastern Time and Sunday at 3 pm from the Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A. NASA has additional backup launch times planned for May 31 and June 1.

 

The Demo-2 mission with the Crew Dragon spacecraft was supposed to lift off on Wednesday, May 27, at 9.33 P.M. Eastern Time on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. But lightning, storm clouds, and tropical storm Bertha to the north of Cape Canaveral forced NASA and SpaceX to call off the launch.

 

The launch required not only good weather conditions around the launch site to take place but also in recovery areas too in the Atlantic Ocean. Various splashdown zones were available fro

m Florida to the Irish Coast if the spacecraft needed to abort the launch, dependent on calm seas.

The launch of ‘Demo-2’ is significant because it is the first flight of NASA crews from the US soil since 2011 and the first launch of a rocket developed by a private company. NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station. It is to be noted that SpaceX is owned by billionaire businessman Elon Musk.

 

SpaceX has been funded to the tune of $2.6 billion to develop Crew Dragon, while Boeing has received $4.2 billion as part of the same Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program to develop its Starliner spacecraft, which it hopes to launch with humans next year.

 

The International Space Station orbits Earth about once every 90 minutes, so the Crew Dragon has to lift off the pad in Florida at an exact time to rendezvous with the space station. The NASA astronauts will dock the spacecraft with the ISS about 19 hours after liftoff, depending on the day of the launch.

 

Both astronauts Behnken and Hurley will stay on the space station for between one and four months, helping the three astronauts already on board with their roster of scientific experiments and station maintenance, before returning to Earth in the Crew Dragon and splashing down into the Atlantic Ocean.