A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft unloads fuel before liftoff from pad 39A for the Crew-6 mission at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 27, 2023.
Chandan Khanna | Afp | Getty Images
NASA and SpaceX early Monday delayed the launch of two US astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a United Arab Emirates crew just minutes before they were due to depart from Florida on a flight to the International Space Station.
The US space agency and SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, cited a technical error in the flow of ignition fluid used to start the spacecraft’s engines.
The countdown appeared to be progressing smoothly until about two and a half minutes before blastoff, when NASA announced in a live webcast that the launch of four crew members on a six-month science mission would be delayed.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Crew Dragon capsule is scheduled to lift off at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The first backup launch opportunity for the mission is set for early Tuesday, about 24 hours from the initial attempt to get the rocket off the ground.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX immediately said how long it would take before they were ready to try again. Eleventh-hour launch scrubs are routine in the complex and risky endeavors of human spaceflight.
If Monday’s launch is successful, the crew is expected to take about 25 hours to reach their destination on the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.
Designated Crew 6, the mission will be the sixth ISS team launched by NASA at SpaceX since Musk’s California-based company began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.