Glitch forces SpaceX to postpone Falcon 9 rocket launch
The company postponed for at least 24 hours the first commercial flight of its rocket, a launch vehicle tailored for eventual crewed missions into orbit
Cape Canaveral — A last-minute technical glitch prompted SpaceX on Thursday to postpone for at least 24 hours the first commercial flight of its updated Falcon 9 rocket, a launch vehicle tailored for eventual crewed missions into orbit. The rocket’s onboard computers halted the countdown about one minute before the newly minted Block-5 edition of the Falcon 9 was set to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on its maiden mission, to carry a communications satellite into orbit for Bangladesh. A few minutes after blast-off was aborted, mission controllers for billionaire Elon Musk’s private launch company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, said they would try again on Friday. They will have roughly the same two-hour-plus launch window running from 8.14pm-10.21pm GMT. The precise reason for Thursday’s automatic shutdown of the final launch sequence was not determined. Launch commanders will have to sift through data logs produced by onboard computers to lea...
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