A U.S. mission to send the first
unmanned commercial spacecraft to the International Space
Station was aborted with a half second left in the countdown.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s Falcon 9 rocket,
carrying the company's Dragon capsule, attempted to lift off at
4:55 a.m. yesterday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A computer
detected an engine pressure problem, grounding the rocket and
delaying the flight for a new attempt May 22.
The closely held company, known as SpaceX and led by
billionaire Elon Musk, was trying to make history by docking its
vehicle with the station. The U.S. government retired its own
shuttle fleet last year and relies on other countries for rides
to space. The U.S. wants the private sector to take over the job
of ferrying supplies to and from the lab.
“This is not a failure,” Gwynne Shotwell, president of
Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX, said during a National
Aeronautics and Space Administration press conference after the
scrubbed attempt. “We aborted with purpose. It would be a
failure if we were to have lifted off with an engine trending in
this direction.”
The engines ignited and rumbled momentarily before going
silent. An on-board computer aborted the launch a half-second
before liftoff after detecting high pressure in engine five,
possibly caused by a fuel valve malfunction, Shotwell said. An
inspection later yesterday found a faulty valve on the engine,
and it was to be replaced last night.
“The software did what it was supposed to do -- aborted
engine five, and it went through the remaining engine
shutdown,” she said. The Falcon 9 rocket needs all nine engines
for liftoff and at least seven to achieve orbit.
Launch Delays
The problem was similar to one that occurred during the
maiden flight of the Falcon 9 in 2010, Shotwell said. That lift-
off was also scrubbed, though only temporarily.
SpaceX planned to have technicians inspect the engine. The
new launch was rescheduled for May 22, with a back-up date the
following day.
NASA, which has worked with SpaceX on the launch, streamed
the pre-dawn liftoff live on its website. The attempt followed
almost three years of delays and featured an overhauled capsule
that was “fundamentally a new spacecraft,” Shotwell said May
18.
It was to be the third flight of the Falcon 9 rocket.
Three-quarters of the world's families of rockets had at least
one failure in the first three flights, according to research
cited in a press kit distributed by SpaceX days before the
launch.
International Partners
Nine out of 10 launch failures are caused by engine
malfunctions, stage separation mishaps or avionics problems,
according to the 31-page document.
Only spacecraft developed by the governments of the U.S.,
Europe, Japan and Russia have docked with the station, which
orbits about 240 miles above Earth. None of those vehicles has
the ability to return significant amounts of science experiments
to Earth, as the manned shuttle did and as the Dragon capsule is
designed to do.
The spacecraft held more than 1,000 pounds of cargo such as
food, clothing and lab equipment as well as student science
experiments. Officials said the supplies weren't critical to the
space station mission.
NASA retired the shuttle in July before companies such as
SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. (ORB) (ORB), based in Dulles, Virginia,
proved they could resupply the station. The Obama administration
a year earlier canceled a program to develop a shuttle
successor, betting the private sector would offer lower costs.
Commercial Reliance
SpaceX and Orbital have been awarded almost $700 million in
NASA contracts to develop the ability to deliver cargo to the
station, and another $3.5 billion for 20 resupply missions
slated to begin this fall.
The decision to rely on commercial technology to carry
supplies starting in 2012 and astronauts in 2017 “is inherently
risky because the vehicles are not yet proven and are
experiencing delays in development” according to a March report
by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's
investigative arm.
NASA doesn't have agreements with its Russian, Japanese and
European partners beyond 2016, according to the report. If those
deals and the commercial launches don't work out, “the
situation could lead to a potential cargo shortfall,” the GAO
said.
SpaceX's Dragon capsule was scheduled to separate from the
rocket about 10 minutes after liftoff, according to Shotwell.
It was to spend the first 24 hours essentially catching up
to the station. Early May 21, it was to perform a fly-by at a
distance of 1.5 miles to test sensors and flight systems before
attempting to dock early May 22.
The mission follows a planned May 7 liftoff that was
postponed to test software. The flight to the station was
initially projected for June 2009.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Brendan McGarry in Washington at
bmcgarry2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephanie Stoughton at
sstoughton@bloomberg.net
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