SpaceX the Alan Notes

SpaceX has delayed the launch of its latest Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket – tasked with lofting the ASIASAT-6 satellite into orbit – for one to two weeks. The call was made by CEO Elon Musk shortly after the rocket had been erected at her Space Launch Complex -40 (SLC-40) pad, with the rationale based on giving the team more time to evaluate any potential commonality with an incident involving a test vehicle.

Falcon 9 Delay:

Initially, no specific reasons was provided as to why the call was made, although engineers had been working on a helium leak throughout the past 24 hours or so, as noted during Monday’s Launch Readiness Review (LRR) that classed this as an open item, per L2.

This resulted in a go to proceed with the launch attempt – thus making the problem an unlikely reason for the delay.

While the launch vehicle was being rolled out and erected at the pad, Mr. Musk is understood to have e-mailed the SpaceX team to postpone the launch, in order to “give the team more time to check everything” ahead of the mission.

“Falcon 9 / AsiaSat-6 launch that was planned for 8/27, 0050L-0405L, has been scrubbed per SpaceX, ” added KSC/Cape Status. “There is no new launch date at this time and no reason given at this time.”

While the evaluations into the test failure were also classed as the official reason behind the one day delay of the ASIASAT-6 mission – when the mission moved to Wednesday morning – sources suggest there was little to be concerned about between the test failure and the upcoming launch. It was also mooted that the launch date was expected to slip by a day, even before the F-9R Dev-1 had her issue.

The reason the former did not happen for the F-9R Dev-1 is because she does not lift off from a regular launch pad and thus does not have the hold down posts to stop the rocket from lifting off in an off-nominal condition.

Yet despite reviewing the test vehicle incident, ahead of Friday’s Static Fire – resulting a go to proceed, and again ahead of the Wednesday morning attempt, this was the reason for the delay being called.

“SpaceX has decided to postpone the flight of AsiaSat 6. We are not aware of any issue with Falcon 9, nor the interfaces with the Spacecraft, but have decided to review all potential failure modes and contingencies again. We expect to complete this process in one to two weeks, ” noted Mr. Musk.

“What we do want to triple-check is whether even highly improbable corner case scenarios have the optimal fault detection and recovery logic. This has already been reviewed by SpaceX and multiple outside agencies, so the most likely outcome is no change. If any changes are made, we will provide as much detail as is allowed under US law.”