14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) announced yesterday, April 14, that the planned launch of the company's third private resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) had been delayed until April 18, following a helium leak that engineer teams discovered on the rocket.
SpaceX is conducting resupply flights to the ISS with its Dragon unmanned space capsule and Falcon 9 medium-lift delivery system. The company carries out these missions under a $1.6 billion (€1.16 billion) Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract with NASA. The flight scheduled to take off yesterday is the third the company will conduct under this contract.
The launch of CRS-3 has already been delayed multiple times, due to both issues at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's (CCAFS) Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) and other satellite launches. The US government sped up the launch of two new spy satellites from the CCAFS, so SpaceX had to push its mission back to accommodate these flights.
It finally seemed that April 14 would see the Dragon soaring into the sky aboard the Falcon 9, but engineers assessing the status of the rocket found a helium leak in one of its systems. The issue was deemed too complex to be resolved in time, so SpaceX defaulted to its backup launch date, on Friday, April 18. A launch window opens at around 15:25 EDT (1925 GMT), Space News reports.
“A fix will be implemented by the next launch opportunity on Friday April 18, though weather on that date isn’t ideal,” SpaceX said in a statement posted to its website shortly after yesterday's launch was delayed. It remains to be seen if engineers will be able to fix the helium leak in the first stage of the delivery system in time.
Any additional delays beyond April 18 could have significant implications for other missions. Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) is scheduled to launch its first COTS resupply mission to the ISS on May 6, but the Cygnus capsule and the Antares rocket that carries it will only launch on that date if SpaceX misses Friday's launch window.
If the Falcon 9 is repaired in time, then OSC will only get to launch their Antares rocket after June 9. The additional delay will be caused by the launch of the second half of the Expedition 39 crew aboard the ISS, on May 28. The astronaut trio will take off from Russia aboard a Soyuz capsule riding on a Soyuz rocket.
There is the very real possibility of a small-scale traffic jam aboard the station if SpaceX does not make its current launch window. Both Dragon and Cygnus use the same American-built docking port on the ISS and cannot dock to the more numerous Russian ports.
Any additional delays for CRS-3 could also hamper with SpaceX's busy commercial satellite launch schedule.