EDITOR’S NOTE: Updated at 2 a.m. EST (0700 GMT) with a delay to Saturday.
SpaceX scrubbed a Falcon 9 launch attempt on Thursday to evaluate a ‘somewhat high’ pressure in the rocket’s liquid oxygen tank, and officials rescheduled the company’s last mission of the year to Saturday morning.
A sensor reading on the top stage of the Falcon 9 caused an “auto-abort” at T-minus 1 minute 53 seconds, while SpaceX counted down to a scheduled launch from Kennedy Space Center at 9:45 a.m. EST (1445 GMT) Thursday.
The Falcon 9 launch team has reset the countdown clock to maintain the opportunity to retry sending the Falcon 9 rocket to the sky before the end of Thursday’s three-hour launch window. Ultimately, officials decided to keep the missile on the ground to have more time to evaluate the potential problem on the upper stage.
SpaceX initially wanted to try to relaunch the Falcon 9 rocket on Friday, but the company said late Thursday that the mission would be rescheduled to Saturday morning to allow extra time for checkout.
A top-secret payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government’s spy satellite agency, is mounted on top of the Falcon 9 missile. The mission, dubbed NROL-108, will be SpaceX’s 26th and final Falcon 9 flight of 2020, surpassing the company’s previous record of 21 launches in a year in 2018.
Read our mission preview to learn more about the launch.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, said engineers rated a “somewhat high” pressure in the rocket’s liquid oxygen tank.
“Stepping down for today to inspect the missile,” Musk tweeted.
SpaceX dropped the Falcon 9 rocket horizontally on pad 39A on Thursday evening, presumably to conduct inspections on the second stage.
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