First commercial flight to space station delayed
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Washington - The first commercial spacecraft due to dockwith the International Space Station could be delayed by as much as aweek to allow more testing, the chief of private venture Space X saidMonday.
Chief executive Elon Musk said on Twitter that the planned April30 launch would be pushed back approximately one week to allow thecompany time to test the systems that it will use to dock with thestation. A new launch date would be set in coordination with US spaceagency NASA.
Space X's Dragon spacecraft is to take a three-day flight to theISS and undertake a series of complicated docking manoeuvres andtests designed to prove it can safely latch onto the orbitingstation.
The Dragon capsule will launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from theKennedy Space Centre in Florida and carry 521 kilogrammes of cargo,mainly food for astronauts living on the station. If all goes asplanned it will return to Earth with 660 kilogrammes of discardedcargo.
At a media briefing last week, NASA and Space X said they wereconfident about the mission, but stressed it was a test flight andthe docking to the station would be particularly difficult.
The Dragon is to remain at the station for several weeks to unloadcargo before returning home and splashing down off the coast ofCalifornia.
The move is seen as a landmark in the development of a commercialspaceflight industry that is to eventually carry astronauts aloft incoming years.
NASA retired its ageing space shuttle fleet last year and plans tofocus on developing craft to travel on longer missions, with theirsights eventually set on Mars. It hopes to shift short-range flightsto the ISS and elsewhere to the commercial space industry, but untilthen is reliant on Russian Soyuz craft to carry astronauts aloft.//DPA
