The corporation was supposed to launch this flight last year

Feb 3, 2012 21:01 GMT  ·  By

Officials from the Hawthorne, California-based Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) and the American space agency say that the private space mission which was supposed to launch to the International Space Station on February 7 has again been delayed, this time to at least March 20.

SpaceX is working towards developing the Falcon 9 medium-lift delivery system and the Dragon cargo spacecraft, under a $1.6 billion Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract with NASA. Receiving additional funding is dependent on fulfilling certain milestones.

What SpaceX did was ask NASA for permission to combine two flights required by the COTS program in a single flight. Originally, it was supposed to conduct a mission to test the Dragon capsule for the second time, and then try to dock to the ISS.

But the company was recently allowed to combine these two COTS milestones into a single one. Therefore, this flight carries a lot of importance for both SpaceX and the private space industry as a whole. If it fails, then a lot of question marks will be placed on NASA helping private corporations.

Under these circumstances, it's easy to understand why the company is taking its time in launching the mission. If successful, the flight will prove that Congress was right in directing NASA to fund private entrepreneurs for low exploring low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Speaking of the new delay, the NASA ISS program manager, Mike Suffredini, told reporters on February 2 that the newly-advanced date is not set in stone. Most likely, the actual takeoff date will be announced in the coming weeks, Space reports.

“There are no big problems being worked but there's a lot of little things they're trying to wrap up. It's a challenging date, so I wouldn’t hold my breath that that's going to be the date we'll actually launch. We'll fly within a couple weeks of that date, probably,” Suffredini explained.

If the launch is successful, the Dragon space capsule will be set on an orbital track that will enable it to catch up with the ISS. When this happens, astronauts aboard the station will use the Candarm-2 robotic arm to latch onto the spacecraft, and then direct it to the American-built docking port on the space lab.

This is the same docking process used for the H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) used by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).