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Comment by adastra | Hacker News Reader

The space industry's go-to place for minute by minute updates on any launch is Spaceflight Now:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/005/status.html

Here's the last couple of updates:

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013 1527 GMT (10:27 a.m. EST) "It appears that although it achieved Earth orbit, Dragon is experiencing some kind problem right now," said John Insprucker, SpaceX's Falcon 9 product manager. We'lll have to learn about the nature of what happened. According to procedure, we expect a press conference to be held a few hours from now. At that time, further info may be available."

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013 1524 GMT (10:24 a.m. EST) ANOMALY. SpaceX is reporting some type of anomaly on the Dragon spacecraft. Deployment of the solar arrays was supposed to occur at T+plus 11 minutes, 45 seconds, but on-board cameras did not show the panels unfurl as planned. SpaceX's webcast cut away from the solar array view and went to a slate.

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> According to procedure, we expect a press conference to be held a few hours from now.

How normal is this? It strikes me as odd, but I know nothing.

It's normal for any NASA mission. Your average comsat launch isn't going to get any press coverage, and the military sure isn't holding press conferences after their classified missions. But pretty much every NASA science and space station mission is going to get a lot of interest.

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013 1736 GMT (12:36 p.m. EST) "A NASA official says three Dragon thruster pods are required to approach the International Space Station."

Is there any chance of them getting all three thruster pods active? If not, will they have to abort the mission?

There are four pods. One is working already, so they need to reactivate two of the three that are squelched. They have telemetry, and solar power, so that gives them time to work on the problem; battery lifetime is not a constraint.

But if they can't get this solved, the delivery can't happen, and the cargo is likely lost. They could try to recover some of it by bringing the Dragon down, and hoping the chutes work --- if they've got enough fuel and control to do that in a controlled way. But that would still result in the loss of the unpressurized cargo in the "trunk", which is separated and burns up on reentry, and also probably some time-sensitive experimental material inside the Dragon itself.

Is there any chance NASA will let them go ahead with two pods? I see that only two are required for full control of the craft, but I assume NASA wants three for redundancy in case of a failure.

The latest is that Saturday's docking has been scratched. It takes about a day to get into position.

Dragon is still up there and orbiting and will probably continue to do so for several days without effort, so SpaceX still has an opportunity to fix what's wrong.

Latest news is that they've got the problem fixed, but they're going to delay until Sunday to make sure.

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