Posted on 05/02/2012 4:19:15 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
The first commercial cargo run to the International Space Station is off for next week.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX, announced the latest delay Wednesday. The company did not set a new launch date.
A Falcon rocket carrying a Dragon capsule was supposed to blast off from Cape Canaveral on Monday. But additional software testing was ordered. The test flight is already three months late.
It will be the first time a private entity launches a supply ship to the space station. Only governments currently do that. NASA used to stockpile the space station through the shuttles. But the fleet was retired last summer. The space agency wants commercial providers to take over that role.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
The SpaceX Dragon capsule is prominent in this photo of the Falcon 9 rocket in its lowered position at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's launch complex in Florida.
I wonder if NASA will ever be satisfied with the software?
Lots of great pics on their updates page.
http://www.spacex.com/updates.php
Found this on spaceflightnow.com.
Next Monday’s SpaceX Falcon 9 launch date in doubt
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/003/120501delay/
There is an Atlas 5 launch tomorrow at 2:46pm EDT (11:46 PDT).
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av031/status.html
Might want to start a live thread tomorrow morning for it.
Back to a regular tagline
The software issue has been repeatedly cited as the reason for the delays for about 6 months now. It doesn’t sound like a difficult problem yet it remains, apparently, insurmountable. Is the issue technical or political?
“It doesnt sound like a difficult problem yet it remains, apparently, insurmountable. Is the issue technical or political?”
The didn’t employ enough Muslims.
Somehow the Angry Birds interface didn't cut the mustard?
Commercial providers are NOT CAPABLE of taking over and never will be.
They bought the Angry Brides version by mistake.
That doesn’t look big enough to get 3 people off in an emergency. Maybe 2.
/johnny
/johnny
Oh horse hockey. SpaceX has come a lot farther more quickly than CxP would ever had. SpaceX used what works, not re-inventing everything because they (CxP) had buckets full of money.
Cargo and passenger runs to LEO is a great example of how commercial providers can free up NASA to do the blending edge stuff.
Oh, and NASA uses commercial providers for space to ground communications for a number of missions.
So much for commercial Space!
Tell that to Boeing.
/johnny
Bullshit
I see you are already taking an assbeating for such a silly comment. So I'll just add this.....NASA did it all themselves, no engineers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Teledyne, Sperry Rand, Motorola, Bendix, Hamilton Sunstand or any other of the multidude of vendors had the slightest input. It was all NASA. Snort.
It’s probably political, NASA is populated by preferentially hired and promoted Affirmative Action bureaucrats that too often do nothing more than try to impede the work of others. And drink coffee and use free Internet.
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