Just days ago, an official announcement was made that a space flight would be delayed. Why would this be important to you, aren’t they all delayed?
With the retirement of the Space Shuttle the U.S. may have people wanting to become astronauts but we have no way to get them into space. The country is committed to relying on commercial space companies to develop rockets and capsules, and to restore our ability to launch cargo and then people into space. The only way to get our people to the space station (that we have spent billions building) is to launch them on a Russian rocket, and all rockets have potential problems.
These commercial space companies are learning to not only navigate to the Space Station, but through the process of getting ready to fly. These companies are designed to be small and agile, but this may mean that they do not have all of the expertise they need to document their readiness. They also are trying to fly into space with a workforce that is young and enthusiastic, so they may not have the advantage of depth of experience. It is very likely that they are realizing the true scope of the task only just now.
The Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas is a NASA center that deals with the commercial operators through their Commercial Crew and Cargo Development Office, run by astronaut Brent Jett. That office works with the companies such as Space Exploration Incorporated. SpaceX, as they are called, builds the Falcon series of rockets and the Dragon series of capsules.
The vehicle that is most ready to fly is the Dragon cargo capsule, it has made one successful test flight. The initial, cargo, version does not have a crew and so is steered by ground command to a specific recovery spot off of California. This is the mission that has just been delayed, SpaceX now will launch no earlier than the middle of March and likely as late as the middle of April (the most recent proposed date was Feb 2012 but that it was previously rescheduled from an earlier date). But each delay impacts our ability to get full use out of the expensive International Space Station – the crew there needs supplies. There are options – the Russian Progress freighter, the European Automated Transfer Vehicle, and the Japanese H-2 Transfer Vehicle. The problem with them is that none of them have a recoverable capsule, they are all commanded to a destructive reentry in the Pacific. So used hardware, samples, and equipment that we wish to return for analysis cannot be brought down in those vehicles. We now see the problems that were predicted when we retired the Space Shuttle before we had replaced its basic capabilities. Each launch delay just reminds us that we could have gotten a commercial capability started while retaining the ability to fly space shuttles, so that the inevitable delays would easily tolerated.
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