Space
Harbor Launch holds a rideshare after a ground-system fault
The coastal operator scrubbed a dawn window on the Cape Merrow pad. The satellites are fine. The countdown was not.
Hanae Sato
Space correspondent
Cape Merrow5 min
Harbor Launch called off a rideshare mission at Cape Merrow forty minutes before the opening of a two-hour window on Sunday, after a ground-side valve that feeds the upper-stage chilldown failed a redundant check. The vehicle was not fueled to flight levels. None of the eleven small satellites on the stack were armed.
The company said the next opportunity on the same trajectory is Wednesday, weather allowing, and that customers have been told to plan for that day rather than a same-week recycle. Range time at Cape Merrow is shared with a larger government launch late in the week, which is why Sunday’s scrub costs more than a valve.
“This is the unglamorous part of a cadence,” said Petra Lang, Harbor’s launch director, speaking beside the pad after the team stood down. “The rocket is a machine we understand. The ground system is a building we are still teaching to be boring.”
Four of the payloads are replacements for spacecraft that missed a summer flight on a different vehicle. Their operators, including a weather-data firm that sells into airline dispatch, can wait until Wednesday. They cannot wait until November, when the same orbit’s lighting gets awkward and the data they sell gets thin. The hold is a ground-system story. The calendar pressure belongs to the satellites.
