ATLANTIC, Va. (AP) - The
launch of a rocket carrying two satellites
for the Air Force and NASA was
scrubbed early Monday because of a problem with the flight software, officials
said.
The mission, which would
have included the first takeoff from the mid-Atlantic region's commercial
spaceport, will be postponed until at least Wednesday - and possibly for as
long as two to three weeks - while the problem is being resolved, said Neal
Peck, program manager for the Air Force's TacSat-2
satellite.
Peck described the problem
as an "anomaly with the spacecraft flight software.'' That problem, first
discovered Sunday night, would have prevented one of the satellites from
getting enough power in space to conduct all its experiments.
"Rather than me standing in
front of you in a few hours saying we have a serious problem with a spacecraft
on orbit, we've caught it up before we've gone up,'' Peck said from NASA's
Wallops Flight Facility, where the spaceport launch pad is located.
The 69-foot Minotaur I
rocket was to blast off at 7 a.m. EST, carrying the TacSat-2, designed to test
the military's ability to transmit images of enemy targets to battlefield
commanders in minutes, a process that now can take hours or days.
Peck said the glitch
occurred in software that controls the pointing of the satellite toward the
sun, which helps it use solar rays for battery charging. The panels are 45
degrees off.
"So we would not be
receiving sufficient power to the spacecraft to power all our systems and to
conduct all our experiments,'' Peck said.
Also aboard the rocket was
the NASA's
shoebox-size GeneSat-1 satellite, which carries a harmless strain of E.
coli bacteria as part of an experiment to study the long-term effects of space
on living organisms. The results could be useful for NASA's mission to Mars.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional
Spaceport, or MARS, is one of only six federally licensed launch centers in the
country. The Air Force will pay the spaceport $621,00[0] for the launch,
spaceport director Billie Reed said Sunday.
The Virginia Commercial
Space Flight Authority, a state agency created in 1995, built the launch pad in
1998 on land leased from NASA on Wallops Island on Virginia's Eastern Shore
peninsula. Maryland later joined the commercial venture.
Orbital Sciences Corp. of
Dulles built the rocket with two stages made from decommissioned Minuteman
intercontinental ballistic missiles and two stages from Pegasus rockets.
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