SpaceX postponed for 24 hours a secretive US military launch Sunday morning after the company detected a ‘sensor issue’ with the rocket less than a minute before the scheduled liftoff, a spokesman said.
The launch was pushed to Monday morning at Cape Canaveral, Florida – just 52 seconds before liftoff was set to occur.
‘Out of an abundance of caution we have decided to scrub today’s launch,’ a SpaceX spokesman said, describing the issue as relating to the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket.
The classified mission, known as NROL-76, will launch a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. This will be SpaceX’s first mission for the California-based company, headed by billionaire tycoon Elon Musk.
‘As a matter of policy and because of classification, NRO does not provide information about our contracts,’ a spokeswoman told AFP.
Until now, the US military has spent billions per year exclusively with United Launch Alliance, a joint operation of aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to launch government satellites.
SpaceX in 2014 protested the US Air Force’s practice of using only ULA, saying it unfairly awarded billions of dollars to a single company for national security launches.
SpaceX was selected to launch NROL-76 ‘after a competition,’ said the NRO spokeswoman.
She said she did not know when the contract was awarded. It was first announced last year.
No details were made public about the satellite on the Falcon 9.
SpaceX regularly launches unmanned cargo ships to the International Space Station, and is working on a crew capsule that could carry humans into orbit as early as next year.
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