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space (spās) n. 1. space beyond the atmosphere of the earth.

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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

SpaceX Falcon 1 Launch Set for Today

This from Elon:

The abort that occurred a few minutes before T-0 was triggered by our ground control software. It commanded a switchover of range telemetry from landline to radio, which took place correctly, however, because of the hardware involved, this transition takes a few hundred milliseconds. Before it had time to complete, our system verification software examined state and aborted.

Our simulations done beforehand all passed, because the simulator did not account for a hardware driven delay in the transition. We considered putting the vehicle into a safe state yesterday and updating the ground control software to make the very minor fix needed, but the safer course of action was to stand down.

Yesterday afternoon and evening (Kwaj time), our launch team updated the software to address the timing issue and verified that there were no similar problems elsewhere. We ran the software through several simulated countdowns and then once again with the rocket and range in the loop.

All systems are now go for launch with T-0 at 4pm California time today (Tues).

--Elon--


The Webcast is still set for T-1 hour (so 5:00 pm CST). Good luck to SpaceX!

1 comment:

Mike Dierken said...

Hi - I have a little tool that I use to chat about pages and events - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4039/

It's a Firefox sidebar and you just open it up when on a page (like the spacex home page). I posted commentary from the SpaceX webcast to it for those that came in late.

We are over at http://www.spacex.com/ waiting for the webcast to start.