Falcon 1 Launch Date Scheduled for November 25
On Friday, November 25 at 1 p.m. PST (9 p.m. GMT), the Falcon 1 countdown to launch is expected to reach T-Zero. At that point, the hold-down clamps will release and the Falcon 1 rocket will begin its journey to orbit, accelerating to 17,000 mph (twenty-five times the speed of sound) in less than ten minutes.
The customer for this mission is DARPA and the Air Force and the payload will be FalconSat-2, part of the Air Force Academy’s satellite program that will measure space plasma phenomena, which can adversely affect space-based communications, including GPS and other civil and military communications.
Falcon 1 Launch Delayed by Army Range to Saturday, November 26
In order to facilitate preparations for a missile defense launch, the Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) has bumped the SpaceX Falcon 1 maiden flight from its officially scheduled launch date of Friday, November 25 at 1 p.m. PST (9 p.m. GMT). The new launch time is Saturday, November 26 at 1 p.m. PST (9 p.m. GMT).
All prelaunch preparation by SpaceX is complete. The final task of test firing the torch igniters worked on the first attempt, making us green for launch. Since our launch was bumped by a day to Saturday (California time), we will make tomorrow a shorter day and do some of the optional checkouts of systems that might cause a halt in the countdown.
Falcon 1 Launch Now Scheduled for 2 p.m. CA time (10 p.m. GMT) Today.
A LOX fill problem has been corrected. Expected launch time is now approx 5 p.m. California time.
The launch is scrubbed for today. As I warned, the likelihood of an all new rocket launching from an all new launch pad on its first attempt is low.
What happened was that an auxiliary liquid oxygen (LOX) fill tank had a manual vent valve incorrectly set to vent. The time it took to correct the problem resulted in significant LOX boiloff and loss of helium, and it was the latter that caused the launch abort. LOX is used to chill the helium bottles, so we lose helium if there is no LOX to cool the bottles.
Although we were eventually able to refill the vehicle LOX tanks, the rate at which we could add helium was slower than the rate at which LOX was boiling away. There was no way to close the gap, so the launch had to be called off. In addition, we experienced an anomaly with the main engine computer that requires further investigation and was arguably reason in and of itself to postpone launch.
We anticipate a new launch attempt in mid-December, depending on the timing of LOX resupply from Hawaii (our LOX plant on Omelek can only produce about one ton per day).