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SpaceX, NASA delay Crew-1 astronaut launch to Sunday due to rocket recovery weather
SpaceX's first four-astronaut launch for NASA is going to have to wait at least an extra day to get off the ground.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule were slated to launch the astronauts to the International Space Station on Saturday (Nov. 14) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That mission, called Crew-1, will now launch no earlier than Sunday at 7:27 p.m. EST (0027 Nov. 16 GMT) due to weather delays from Tropical Storm Eta that affected SpaceX's drone ship rocket recovery operations. The launch itself had a promising 70% chance of good weather.
"Fundamentally, this was an issue of getting the drone ship there in time," Benji Reed, SpaceX's senior director for human spaceflight programs, told reporters in a Friday press conference. "The weather was such because of this tropical storm, that we couldn't get the drone ship to leave in time and get there."
SpaceX uses automated drone ships as floating landing pads in the Atlantic Ocean to recover the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket for later reuse. But good weather is needed for those operations.
Recovering the Crew-1 mission's first stage is vital since the booster will be used on SpaceX's next astronaut flight for NASA, which is due to launch March 30.
"This booster is very important for us," NASA's Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stitch said. " We're going to reuse the first stage that we're flying on Crew-1 for the Crew-2 mission coming up in the springtime."