“Better to Be Paranoid and Wrong” — SpaceX Thanksgiving Launch Scrubbed for a Few Days
Without making the obvious “turkeys can’t fly” joke — wait, I just did — SpaceX had to scrub the launch of its Falcon 9 rocket’s launch of a telecommunications satellite from Cape Canaveral in Florida yesterday morning.
According to SpaceX, the SES-8 is an “Orbital Sciences GEOStar-2 spacecraft that will provide communications coverage of the South Asia and Asia Pacific regions. This hybrid Ku- and Ka-band spacecraft weighs 3,138 kg (6,918 lbs) at launch.” It was to be delivered to a “geosynchronous transfer orbit 80,000 km from Earth — that’s ¼ of the way to the moon.”
In other words, it was heavy, and it had to travel far. Thus, it’s still on terra firma, after the second attempt to launch. The first try was on Monday.
SpaceX said the team was having another gander at the engines, and would try to hoist it into the sky in a few days.
SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk tweeted that, too, yesterday, but with more color:
We called manual abort. Better to be paranoid and wrong. Bringing rocket down to borescope engines …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2013