CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX scrubbed today’s (July 31) launch attempt of the Crew-11 astronaut mission for NASA.
Launch officials called the scrub just over a minute before liftoff, due to a bank of cumulus clouds that appeared over in the skies over NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here.
“Unfortunately, the weather is just not playing alongside with today’s excitement on the launch for NASA SpaceX‘s Crew-11,” NASA commentator Derrol Nail said during today’s launch coverage.
“We could literally see the clouds kind of going over top of our heads, getting close to the pad, and the standoff area is a 10-mile radius around the pad for these dark clouds, cumulous clouds, and that is a safety factor,” Nail added. “That is because you don’t want to send a rocket through a tall cloud like that — that could generate some energy from the rocket passing through it.”
SpaceX will try again on Friday (Aug. 1) at 11:43 a.m. EDT (1543 GMT). There’s another chance on Saturday (Aug. 2) at 11:21 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT).
When it launches, Crew-11 will see a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket take off from Launch Complex 39A at KSC. Atop the rocket is the company’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft making its sixth flight, a reuse record for Crew Dragon vehicles.
The four crewmembers of Crew-11 are NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Oleg Platonov of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos.
When it launches, Crew-11 will embark on a roughly 40-hour flight to catch up with the International Space Station, orbiting at a speed of about 17,500 mph (28,000 kph) some 248 miles (400 kilometers) above the surface of Earth.
As its name implies, Crew-11 will be the eleventh operational astronaut mission SpaceX has flown for NASA, through the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which sees NASA send astronauts to and from the ISS on private spacecraft.