As with the rest of Brevard County, life is getting back to normal up on the
Kennedy Space Center, after the nasty weather from Tropical Storm Nicole
interrupted a few things. Last I heard around 40,000 people lost power and the places you'd figure would have trouble, like along the beach or the lagoon, had buildings flooded and other things.
SpaceX had a Falcon 9 mission scheduled for Monday and went into a hold before rolling the vehicle to the pad. SpaceX requires two to three days either side of launch for the recovery drone ship and its support to reach and return from the landing zone, so seas would have been bad out there the whole time. The mission is to deliver another two satellites to geosynchronous orbit for Intelsat, Galaxy 31 and 32. That launch was rescheduled for tomorrow, Saturday, November 12, with the launch window 11:06 AM to 1:06 PM EST, from SLC-40 (Space Launch Complex). You might recall that they launched Galaxy 33 and 34 a month ago. No word on why these satellites aren't launched in numerical order. What's with these people?
Just kidding.
Meanwhile over at SLC-39B, the Artemis/SLS mission preparations were suspended to allow workers to evacuate while the vehicle remained on the mobile launch tower at the pad. The "No Earlier Than" launch time has been moved from Monday November 14 to Wednesday the 16th at 1:04-3:04 AM EST. There were no obvious issues but the vehicle might have been exposed to winds above its design criteria.
With blastoff on a long-delayed maiden flight on tap next week, sensors at pad 39B recorded gusts as high as 100 miles per hour atop a 467-foot-tall lightning tower near the rocket. But winds at the 60-foot-level of the launch gantry, which are part of the booster’s structural certification, peaked at 82 mph, just below the 85 mph limit.
The observed winds were “within the rocket’s capability,” said Jim Free, manager of exploration systems at NASA Headquarters. “We anticipate clearing the vehicle for those conditions shortly.”
“Our team is conducting initial visual check outs of the rocket, spacecraft and ground system equipment with the cameras at the launch pad,” he said in a Twitter post. “Camera inspections show very minor damage such as loose caulk and tears in weather coverings. The team will conduct additional on-site walk down inspections of the vehicle soon.”
I'm sure the vehicle was designed for some amount of margin to crosswinds, considering that the whole stack at lift off is designed for head-on (top down) winds higher than the speed of sound. Probably thousands of mph at booster cutoff, but most rocket stacks are sensitive to crosswinds or wind shear that are considerably lower than that.
Backup opportunities are available on November 19, starting at 1:45 AM, and on November 25, the day after Thanksgiving, at 10:10 AM. There are requirements for Artemis related to recycle time between launch countdowns:
- No more than 3 attempts in 7 days
- Min 48 hrs between attempts 1 and 2
- Min 72 hrs between attempts 2 and 3
Combine that with the complicated look of the dates the missions can fly (here - pdf) and that probably accounts for the spacing from the 16th to the 19th and then to the 25th.
Artemis/SLS back in August for the first attempt to launch. NASA photo.
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