SpaceX and NASA have stood down from Wednesday’s 7:48 p.m. launch try of Crew-10 to the Worldwide House Station (ISS) attributable to a technical challenge on the bottom.
With the 4 crew members strapped into their seats contained in the Crew Dragon spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket on the Kennedy House Heart, the countdown clock was stopped at 7:06 p.m. ET, and on the similar time the decision was made to wash the launch try.
Commentators on the livestream stated the issue centered on the hydraulic system that controls a clamp arm that hyperlinks the rocket to the launch tower.
Please allow Javascript to view this content material
The problem truly surfaced 4 hours earlier than liftoff, with SpaceX engineers saying they had been making an attempt to resolve it. Nevertheless, with about 40 minutes to go and with the difficulty nonetheless excellent, it was determined to halt proceedings for the day.
The following launch alternative is at 7:26 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 13, supplied the difficulty is ready to be resolved.
Commenting on the scrub in the course of the livestream, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, who flew to the area station in 2019, stated: “Flexibility is de facto the important thing to all the pieces we do as astronauts. We all know that the plan is all the time altering and launch scrubs are undoubtedly a actuality that we’ve got seen occur again and again.”
Meir added: “We’re prepared for this, that is what we prepare for. We all know that on the finish of the day it’s possible you’ll be lifting off, you will not be. It’s undoubtedly a bummer for everybody concerned however we are going to once more do as we’re educated and prepare for that subsequent alternative.”
The 4 Crew-10 astronauts — NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Company) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov — will now return to crew quarters on the Kennedy House Heart and await affirmation of a brand new launch time, which might be as quickly as Thursday.
