Musk Advises "Don't Hold Your Breath" For A Firm Date
While discouraged by the
failure of the company's first-ever launch of the Falcon 1 rocket
last March, SpaceX vowed to press on... and the company is nearing
its second launch from the balmy Kwajalein Atoll.
Alas, the original January 22 scheduled launch date has been
moved off to sometime in February, due to an anomaly with a second
stage engine component.
Company founder Elon Musk tells ANN a static firing of the
rocket's main engine will take place between today and Tuesday,
after which time the rocket will be rolled back into the hangar for
more testing...
During our final check-outs prior to static fire, we
uncovered an anomaly with the thrust vector control (TVC) pitch
actuator on the second stage that will result in launch being
pushed to February. Since this is not used during the static fire,
we have decided to push forward with that test in order to acquire
valuable data on engine ignition, pad acoustics, and the overall
system response.
The static fire is now planned to occur between Saturday and
Tuesday (California time). This test will proceed very slowly and
then only burns for about four seconds, so will not be webcast to
avoid boring people silly. We will post a video
afterwards.
Upon completion of the static fire, we will take the rocket
back into the hangar to thoroughly investigate the TVC issue. With
the range available to us only until January 23 (Kwaj needs to
reconfigure for an incoming Minuteman mission), this means launch
is now planned for mid-February.
As I’ve mentioned previously, don’t hold your
breath for this launch. Given the large number of robustness
improvements and the fact that our vehicle/pad health verification
system has increased from about 30 checks to almost 1000, shifts in
the launch date are to be expected.
Overall, the SpaceX team is quite happy with the smooth
progress so far.
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