ORLANDO, Fla. — The next SpaceX crewed launch won’t happen in the wee hours of Halloween after all. Bad weather has delayed the Kennedy Space Center liftoff until early Wednesday.
NASA and SpaceX have reset the mission’s start for 1:10 a.m. Wednesday, rescheduling a flight to the International Space Station that originally had been set to lift off at 2:21 a.m. Sunday.
The move came because of the persistent storm system that has been “meandering across the Ohio Valley and through the northeastern United States this weekend, elevating winds and waves in the Atlantic Ocean along the Crew Dragon flight path for the Oct. 31 launch attempt,” NASA said in an early-morning news release Saturday.
That system is expected to be gone by early Wednesday, with forecasters at the 45th Weather Squadron predicting an 80% chance of favorable weather for liftoff then.
The crew for the third mission with astronauts aboard in the past year includes NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.
They will launch on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A. The Crew-3 astronauts are scheduled for a sixth-month science mission on the space station.
———
