At the last second, Elon Musk’s SpaceX scrubbed plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket, on Sunday, again delaying an attempt to put a satellite into orbit and then land the vehicle’s first stage intact on a sea platform, a step that may eventually slash costs.
The 23-storey rocket, carrying a communications satellite for Luxembourg-based SES SA, was less than two minutes from blast-off at 6:47 p.m. (1147 GMT) when the launch team aborted the countdown, SpaceX said during a webcast. It was the third time that the company postponed the launch of the satellite.
Musk, founder and chief executive of SpaceX, said that Air Force safety officers stopped the countdown after a boat strayed into a restricted zone east of SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch site.
SpaceX resumed the countdown a few minutes later, aiming for a 7:21 p.m. (0121 GMT) launch, but a technical issue automatically stopped the liftoff again, just a second before the planned launch.
SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, did not immediately say when it would make its next attempt to launch the rocket. It would be no earlier than Tuesday, the Air Force said in a statement.
The company is aiming to bring the main stage of its rockets back to Earth so that it can refurbish and reuse them, something that would make launches much more cost-effective.
SpaceX has already succeeded in landing a Falcon rocket at an on-shore site near the Cape Canaveral pad where it launched, but it has failed in three previous attempts to guide rockets back to ocean platforms.
The South-African born Musk is perhaps best known as chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc, a maker of luxury electric cars.
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