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CPMcGraw
01-20-2012, 09:48 PM
The launch of COTS-2 has been delayed until at least the end of March, and maybe into mid April, for some additional simulations and to accommodate several station activities, including a crew return, another cargo ship (ESA) arrival, and a new crew arrival.

Some technical issues were discovered:

"...NASA sources said the company ran into problems with the planned rendezvous profile needed to guide the Dragon capsule to the space station. NASA dispatched a veteran flight director [Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of the commercial cargo program at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston] and trajectory analysts to Hawthorne to help SpaceX get to the bottom of the issue. Sources also said SpaceX engineers had encountered an electromagnetic interference issue with one or more components in the Dragon capsule..."

luke strawwalker
01-21-2012, 12:52 PM
The launch of COTS-2 has been delayed until at least the end of March, and maybe into mid April, for some additional simulations and to accommodate several station activities, including a crew return, another cargo ship (ESA) arrival, and a new crew arrival.

Some technical issues were discovered:

Well, it's good that they're catching potential "gotchas" before they find them out in space... makes the probabilities of success that much higher...

Hopefully they'll get the trajectory problems worked out pretty quickly... which it sounds like it since IIRC they've set the launch for sometime in April...

The EM interference problem might be a bit more vexing-- might be as simple as shielding some components, but it may be more complex and have to be dealt with... again, better to find something going wiggy NOW than in orbit...

When we consider the problems they had getting the first satellites off the ground, or the first manned launches, this really isn't surprising... SpaceX is "the new kid on the block" and really in most ways their performance has been ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! Their first flight last year with Dragon may have been the equivalent of "Big Joe" or something like that, but now their next mission is basically planning to, in effect, a copy of Gemini 8, only using an unmanned vehicle (Dragon) to dock to a manned spacecraft (ISS) instead of the other way around (Gemini 8 was the first docking between a manned Gemini spacecraft and an unmanned spacecraft, in this case an Agena stage). That's a pretty big step up in technical requirements!

SO, it's not surprising that they have some schedule slips and delays... it's actually rather amazing they haven't had more than they have...

later! OL JR :)

CPMcGraw
01-21-2012, 01:51 PM
...Hopefully they'll get the trajectory problems worked out pretty quickly... which it sounds like it since IIRC they've set the launch for sometime in April...

The EM interference problem might be a bit more vexing-- might be as simple as shielding some components, but it may be more complex and have to be dealt with...

I wonder if the two problems might be related...