From: AmericaSpace
The next launch of one of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft atop one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets is now slated to occur no earlier than March of next year.
The second commercial flight of Space Exploration Technologies’ (SpaceX) Dragon cargo vessel to the International Space Station (ISS) has been pushed back from January until no earlier than March 1, 2013. The delay, announced by NASA managers, will allow more time for investigation of the Falcon 9 engine malfunction, which occurred during the launch of the first commercial Dragon mission on Oct. 7.
During the Oct. 7 launch of the Falcon 9 rocket a anomaly in the Falcon 9′s Engine Number One took place a little over a minute into the flight.
Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX is tasked with supplying Dragon spacecraft and the two-stage Falcon 9 launch vehicles to NASA under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract. The speed in which SpaceX has reached this historic milestone has been nothing short of a whirlwind.
Things, however, did not go off without a hitch during SpaceX’s last flight.
About one minute 19 seconds into the CRS-1 flight to the ISS, one of the Falcon’s nine first-stage Merlin engines encountered an…
Read the entire Next SpaceX Commercial Resupply Flight Delayed article and see the rocket pictures :)
