SpaceX scrubs Saturday launch, retry Sunday
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SpaceX scrubbed its debut launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A Saturday morning because of uncertainty regarding readings from the second-stage thruster control system.

The company was saying little else Saturday. The issue was noted about an hour before launch but the countdown was allowed to proceed to the one-second mark before the launch was officially scrubbed.

The launch was postponed until 9:38 a.m. Sunday.

This is to be the first launch in more than five years at Kennedy Space Center. NASA had essentially abandoned the historic launch pad because it no longer has any rockets to use it, since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle program. NASA leased the pad to SpaceX, which rebuilt it to accommodate the company’s Falcon 9 rockets.

The scrubbed launch lost the opportunity to take advantage of beautiful weather at Cape Canaveral, with light clouds, a mild breeze. The weather forecast for Sunday looks almost identical, though there is a 30 percent chance of bad weather.

Scott Powers

Scott Powers is an Orlando-based political journalist with 30+ years’ experience, mostly at newspapers such as the Orlando Sentinel and the Columbus Dispatch. He covers local, state and federal politics and space news across much of Central Florida. His career earned numerous journalism awards for stories ranging from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster to presidential elections to misplaced nuclear waste. He and his wife Connie have three grown children. Besides them, he’s into mystery and suspense books and movies, rock, blues, basketball, baseball, writing unpublished novels, and being amused. Email him at [email protected].



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