LAUNCH POSTPONED

History-making SpaceX flight calle off due to weather

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The beginning of NASA’s next chapter of space exploration will have to wait until the weekend. Space officials on Wednesday postponed the launch of a manned SpaceX rocket en route to the International Space Station because of problematic weather around Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla., and a tropical storm brewing off the coast of the Carolinas.

The early components of Tropical Storm Bertha had battered the Florida panhandle over the weekend and parked over coastal areas of North and South Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaving the risk of isolated thunderstorms or pockets of clouds hovering around the rocket’s launch site.

With lightning seen in the area 17 minutes before the scheduled 2:33 p.m. MDT launch time, the flight’s weather officer made the call to “scrub” the flight. The Crew Dragon’s mission, known as Demo-2, operated under an “instantaneous launch window,” or a narrow period during which weather conditions are amenable for flight. Any sort of weather delay inside an hour of launch time would force the rocket to miss that period.

The mission’s next launch window is scheduled for 1:22 p.m.

MDT Saturday from historic launch pad 39A, the same facility that launched the first astronauts to the moon on Apollo 11 in 1969.

The flight would have culminated years of work and the fulfillment of a risky bet by NASA under the Obama administration to entrust the private sector to fly astronauts. For SpaceX, it was the crescendo of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when founder and chief executive Elon Musk set out to start a space company.

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are both former military pilots who previously had each flown two missions on the space shuttle. Once the spacecraft is launched, it is scheduled to to travel to the International Space Station, 240 miles above Earth. That journey is expected to take about 18 hours. But their ride to space this time will be on a vastly different spacecraft: a fully autonomous, next-generation capsule outfitted with Tesla-like touchscreens and temperature controls that allow astronauts to keep the cabin between 65 and 80 degrees.

But even will a successful launch, their mission is far from complete. The spacecraft needs to catch up with the space station and match the altitude of the laboratory, which orbits Earth at 17,500 mph, and dock with it in a risky and carefully choreographed dance.