Photo: SpaceX
NASA announced this morning that “due to unfavorable weather conditions forecast in offshore areas along the flight track, NASA and SpaceX now are targeting Saturday, March 2 at 11:15 p.m. EST for Crew-8 launch.”
Weather here on the Space Coast appears to be acceptable for a launch, and it appears that forecasters have scaled back their rain estimates for the area — down from 40% chances of precipitation overnight to as little as 15%. Unfortunately, the forecasts aren’t as good along the launch corridor, and in the unlikely case of a launch abort, the crew would be descending into unacceptable conditions.
Forecast: Windy.com
NASA’s Manager of Commercial Crew, Steve Stich, outlined this in a press conference at Kennedy Space Center yesterday. “It’s one of the more complicated times during ascent relative to how we do abort weather,” he said. “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 also said that “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.”
Should that second stage engine fail to ignite properly, the crew would be in an abort mode and down into weather that NASA and SpaceX officials have deemed too risky to attempt a launch at the original planned liftoff time. Conditions are expected over to improve over the next couple of days as the frontal boundary pushes south.
Saturday’s Weather: Iffy.
Saturday may well end up as a repeat of today: weather will likely still be a concern, and a scrub may be necessitated according to today’s forecast by the US Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron:
