The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Monday, September 23, 2024

Crew-9 Launch Thursday Might Slide out in Time

The launch of the Crew-9 mission, which will be the two man flight (instead of the usual four) that brings the Starliner duo of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home next year, has been listed as No Earlier Than this coming Thursday the 26th (2:05PM EDT) for a couple of weeks now. It turns out that a complication is developing that might affect that launch. That complication is currently named "Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine" and by the following map is looking to be Tropical Storm Helene by the next update at 2AM or perhaps 8AM (ET) tomorrow morning.

Image from the National Hurricane Center, screen grab from FLHurricane.com.

Tomorrow at 8AM doesn't matter, what matters is Thursday around launch time, and that's the location up the track where the storm is designated "M" for a major hurricane, Category III or higher, at 2PM Thursday. Right now, that's not going to bring bad conditions to the Space Coast. The forecast predictions call for a 20 - 30% chance of tropical storm winds, or 40mph and up, Thursday afternoon. Whether or not that's acceptable launch weather I don't have a source for but I don't think so. I've looked at the models the NHC uses to derive these predictions and only one model out of more than a dozen forecasts it getting as strong as Category III. Only five models show it even getting as strong as category II.

All those predictions are guaranteed to change over the next couple of days.

For us here south of the Cape, preps will have to be completed NLT Wednesday afternoon. As you can tell by how close the black spots "S" and "H" are at the bottom of the track and the "H" to "M" at the top, the storm's forward motion speeds up as it goes north.

The Crew-9 mission will have no pilot, relying entirely on the autonomous systems of the Dragon capsule carrying Mission Specialist Aleksandr Gorbunov from Roscosmos and Commander Nick Hague from NASA. Their return trip, tentatively set for the end of February, will bring Butch and Suni in the two unoccupied seats.