With less than four hours remaining in the countdown, launch director Bill Cullen called off Saturday’s attempt to send an unmanned Atlas rocket soaring.
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“We’re ready to try again another day”, said Vernon Thorp, a program manager for United Launch Alliance, the rocket maker. Lousy weather already has resulted in a pair of back-to-back launch delays.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Once again, high wind is keeping space station supplies stuck on Earth.
Orbital ATK is one of the two commercial companies hired by NASA after the space shuttles were retired to fly cargo to the ISS. But even the Atlas is no match for Mother Nature.
The United Launch Alliance announced that an Atlas V rocket launch was scrubbed and rescheduled for Sunday afternoon. The mission is Orbital ATK’s first space launch since its Antares rocket exploded in October 2014 just seconds after liftoff, destroying the cargo craft and its thousands of pounds of supplies bound for the astronauts living at the orbiting International Space Station.
At the time of undocking, Expedition 46 will begin aboard the station under the continued command of NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. The other is SpaceX, which has a $1.6 billion contract to fly 12 missions for NASA using Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rockets. On board since March, he’ll be up there until the beginning of this coming March. But if the spacecraft launches later in its 30-minute launch window, its rendezvous with the station will slip to Tuesday (Dec. 8), NASA officials explained in the update.
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This story has been corrected to reflect chance of launch is 40 percent, not 60 percent, in paragraph 4.
