While weather here on the Space Coast looks as though it will have a 90% chance of acceptable launch conditions early Friday morning for a 12:04 AM EST launch of astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin to the International Space Station, NASA officials raised concerns that weather along the watch corridor may not be acceptable.
In a pre-flight press conference this morning at the Kennedy Space Center Press Site, Steve Stich, NASA’s Manager for the Commercial Crew Program said, “Launch weather looks really favorable for Friday morning’s early launch. I would say the abort weather is what we’re watching very carefully.”
45th Weather Squadron Forecast
The 45th Weather Squadron released their first launch forecast for Crew-8 at 12:00 PM EST today:
via: NASA Livestream
Additional Stich Comments At Today’s Press Conference
“We have to have weather along the east coast ground track to be acceptable for launch,” Stich added. “That weather right now is not looking as favorable as we’d like. We’ll do another weather briefing tonight and then we’ll take a look at the weather again.”
He added later that the weather forecast is in the marginal column, but not yet in the zone that would necessitate a scrub out of an abundance of caution. “I would say it’s marginal right now based on the forecast,” Stich said. “We’ll go look at the weather tonight and make a decision. Do we push the launch 24 hours at that point, or do we take it down further? And that’s really going to be based on the weather models and the prediction of this trough. And then sometimes we’ll take it all the way down to the day of launch, and we just have to look at the data a little bit more.”
Why Is Launch Corridor Weather A Critical Concern?
In the relatively unlikely event of a launch abort, NASA and SpaceX want to ensure that conditions for an unplanned splashdown of the crew at sea are safe.
Stich illustrated this with some in-depth comments: “At staging, we look at that location because if you think about all the events that have to happen at staging, when the first stage, the nine Merlin engines shut down, there’s separation and the MVAC engine has to start.”
“It’s one of the more complicated times during ascent relative to how we do abort weather, we basically have a number of points all across the ascent ground track from the launch pad all the way to orbit insertion. And for each one of those points, we look at a weighted risk,” Stich said.
Should that second-stage engine ignition fail to occur, an abort would be necessary. Again, this unlikely, but bad weather is an unacceptable risk for astronauts descending from a far-from-nominal state in their spaceflight.
Not Scrubbed, Not Yet, Stay Tuned
To be clear, at the time of this writing, 1:00 PM EST on Wednesday, the mission has not been delayed. That decision will be made later, so stay tuned.