Yahoo Finance Musk’s SpaceX Test Postponed to Sunday Due to High Winds
(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk’s rocket company has one last, major hurdle to clear before it attempts an historic first flight of astronauts for NASA: proving it can safely abort a mission if something goes wrong after takeoff.
A test of the abort procedure set for Saturday was delayed by 24 hours due to sustained winds and rough seas in the recovery area, SpaceX said on Twitter. It’s now targeting a six-hour window starting at 8 a.m. Eastern time Sunday.
A Falcon 9 rocket with Crew Dragon spacecraft is now slated to launch tomorrow from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About 84 seconds after liftoff, SpaceX plans to demonstrate Dragon’s ability to eject from the rocket during an emergency.
The in-flight abort test includes a series of complex maneuvers before Dragon’s parachutes should deploy and the craft splashes down in the Atlantic Ocean about 10 minutes after liftoff. The Falcon 9 rocket is expected to break up offshore, according to SpaceX’s press kit.
“You design this with the hopes that you never have to use it, but this is showing that it works in the real world,” said former astronaut Garrett Reisman, former director of space operations at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. and a professor of astronautics at the University of Southern California.
The procedure is the final big test before NASA can certify that SpaceX is ready to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. U.S. Air Force Colonel Bob Behnken and former Marine Corps test pilot Doug Hurley will be Dragon’s first passengers.
“There’s a lot riding on this,” said Reisman, who remains an adviser to SpaceX.
Americans have not flown into space aboard a U.S. craft since the shuttle program ended in 2011. Sending astronauts to the space station also is an important step for Musk’s Hawthorne, California-based company. The billionaire chief executive officer aims eventually to transport people to the Moon and Mars.
Read more: Boeing and SpaceX Are Racing to Bring Astronauts, Then Tourists, to Space
“This is the culmination of years of work,” Benji Reed, SpaceX’s director of crew mission management, said during a pre-launch press conference with NASA on Friday.
NASA awarded SpaceX and Boeing Co. a combined $6.8 billion in contracts in September 2014 to revive America’s ability to fly to the space station without buying seats on Russian Soyuz capsules. Since then, the agency and both companies have suffered delays that have put the program more than two years behind schedule.
In December, Boeing’s Starliner failed to dock with the station because of a problem with the mission’s timing software. The Chicago-based company and NASA are investigating, and the agency will decide if Boeing needs to perform a second flight without crew.
SpaceX’s Dragon capsule successfully docked with the station in March as part of its Demo-1 test.
(Updates with test moved to Sunday.)
To contact the reporter on this story: Dana Hull in San Francisco at dhull12@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, Andrew Davis
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