Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning and we’ve got another scrub.
In this case it was an equipment issue with the failure of a Liquid Hydrogen valve to report proper closing. Obviously when it comes to Liquid Hydrogen you do NOT want to mess around with possible problems. Having volatile fuels leaking out at launch leads to some very messy outcomes.
Right now they are on a 48 hour hold to check things out. They need to drain the tanks in order to properly inspect the valve. The indications now are that it is probably an instrumentation issue (IE the valve works but the light bulb burned out scenario) but they want to be sure.
Assuming that the valve checks out they could launch in 48 hours (IE late Thursday/early Friday). If it does not check out and there is a problem with the physical valve then we are looking at a longer pause. They actually have two launch times for Friday, the first around 1am (or late Thursday night on the west coast) and the second later in the evening around 11pm East Coast time.
Obviously weather will still play a factor on the potential launch times.
Had they not launched tonight they’d be in a 48 hour hold anyway as they cycle with 2 launch tries then a 48 hour hold, followed by 2 more tries. They have until the 30th to launch.
So keep checking here for updates, hopefully we’ll have a launch Friday.
********************************************************************************************************
NASA has just scrubbed the scheduled launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery due to weather problems. Weather is a very important issue both in terms of ability to launch and also in terms of a theoretical ability to land at KSC in the event of an emergency.
Storms and lightning did not cooperate so they will try again tomorrow.