The Heartbreak of an Launch Abort
An aborted rocket launch is a frustrating thing to watch. From a causeway linking Merritt Island to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, I watched with a small crowd of other journalists at the blearingly early hour of 4:55 am, waiting for the launch of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket. The early launch time was one of the narrow windows available to line up the Dragon with the orbit of the International Space Station, where it was scheduled to dock four days from now. And it certainly seemed as if all systems were go for this one. The countdown over the PA system went all the way to t-minus .5 seconds, and the first burst of ignition illuminated the pre-dawn sky for a moment…but only a moment, and then we all discovered that it had been called off.
Early analysis pegged the cause for the mission abort as a high-pressure reading in Engine 5 of the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX is playing it awfully safe on this m ission, officially titled COTS-2, which is designed to demonstrate that an unmanned Dragon spacecraft can safely dock with the ISS and deliver supplies. If successfulâ€"or at least, if eventually successfulâ€"the Dragon could carry manned missions to ISS within the next few years, eliminating NASA’s current reliance on Russian spacecraft to bring American astronauts into space. But before the Dragon is even allowed to approach the ISS on the COTS-2 mission, it will have to go through a day’s worth of test maneuvers in space.
The potential promise of SpaceX’s system is hugeâ€"it’s far cheaper and easier to deploy than the now discontinued Space Shuttle program, but there are obviously still some kinks to be worked out. In a press conference shortly after today’s scrubbed launch, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said that the mission is not at all a failure, and that the abort was “with purpose†since the Falcon 9 cannot liftoff without all nine of its engi nes. Shotwell also said that there are two more launch opportunities scheduled for May 22nd and 23rd. Because the Falcon 9 rocket doesn’t enough extra fuel for course correction, the launch windows are literally one second long.
Launch aborts are nothing new and hardly unique to SpaceX, but the company knows that there is a lot of attention being paid to this mission, since, at least for now, the future of the American manned space program seems to be riding on it. And, while old space hands may be used to launch pad fizzles, that seemed cold comfort to the six kids who had come to see the launch as part of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. These tweeners have science experiments onboard the Dragon that are supposed to be delivered up to the ISS. They had traveled from all over the country and woken up early to come see their projects blast off, and now they can’t stay in town until the 22nd, so if the Dragon eventually does lift off, they’ll have to w atch it remotely.
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