NASA and SpaceX early Monday delayed the launch of two American astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a crew member from the United Arab Emirates, minutes before they were due to lift off from Florida to the International Space Station.
The US space agency and SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, cited a technical fault involving the flow of ignition fluid used to start the spacecraft’s engines.
The countdown appeared to be going smoothly until about two and a half minutes before the blast, NASA announced on its live webcast that the launch of the four crew members on the six-month science mission would be delayed.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon capsule was scheduled to lift off at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The first opportunity for a backup launch of the mission was set for early Tuesday, about 24 hours after the initial attempt to get the rocket off the ground.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX immediately said how long it might actually be before they are ready to try again. Dehydration after the eleventh hour is fairly routine in the highly complex and risky endeavors of human spaceflight.
If Monday’s launch was successful, the crew was expected to take about 25 hours to reach their destination at the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting about 420 km above Earth. The Designated Crew 6 mission will carry the sixth long-duration ISS crew that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since Musk’s California company began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.
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