Citing a problem with the rocket's upper-stage engine, Space Exploration Technologies called off a scheduled mission of Falcon 9, which was set to launch commercial telecommunications satellites into space for Internet of Things provider Orbcomm on Friday.
Falcon 9 was gearing up for takeoff at 6:08 p.m. EDT (2208 GMT) from the Air Force station in Cape Canaveral, Florida when flight engineers discovered a decrease in pressure in the rocket's second stage, says John Insprucker, product director of Falcon 9 for SpaceX during a webcast that was supposed to broadcast the launch.
The launch team reset the countdown and initially put off the launch until the end of Friday's 53-minute takeoff window to 7:01 p.m. EDT (2301 GMT). Unfortunately, Falcon 9's flight directors were unable to resolve the problem in the short amount of time and scrubbed the launch with only eight minutes left in the countdown.
"Clock just running out of time to give the team enough minutes to evaluate the data we've been looking at for the last hour," says Insprucker.
SpaceX has not announced when it plans to make another attempt at liftoff, but the next opportunity takes place at 5:46 p.m. EDT (2146 GMT) on Saturday. If the rocket does not lift off until then, SpaceX might have to put off the launch for a week while the Air Force performs scheduled maintenance.
Earlier this year, SpaceX again delayed the Falcon 9 mission due to a helium leak in the rocket, but the company did not say if Friday's aborted mission was in any way related to the cancelled mission in May.
The launch, which was supposedly going to be the tenth in a series of Falcon 9 missions by SpaceX, was intended to blast six of Orbcomm's 25-network second-generation satellites into space and put them into orbit around 800 kilometers above the surface of the Earth.
Orbcomm, which delivers machine-to-machine communication services originally purchased flights on Falcon 1boosters. But when the smaller rockets were retired in 2009, SpaceX moved them to Falcon 9 while keeping the price the same.
"That would be priced today at about $120 million," says Orbcomm chief executive Marc Eisenberg. "They kind of took it on the chin financially to make sure we had a path to space."
SpaceX also designed the Falcon 9 rocket to relight the first stage after separation for a slow descent into a soft ocean landing, making it similar to the Falcon 9 v11 mission that took off in April to send the free-flying Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station. This is only one in a series of technologies that SpaceX is testing to develop a reusable rocket, which, as SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk says, could transform the landscape of the space flight industry for the better.
