Second time lucky for SpaceX
The rocket developed by the founder of PayPal (Elon Musk) has blasted off from a remote island in the South Pacific, bolstering hopes of cheaper fares to fly cargo, and eventually people, into space.
The 21m booster rocket called Falcon 1 lifted off from Omelek Island, a US military missile test site that is part of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and arrived in space minutes later. The launch was not perfect, but certainly pretty good.
The two-stage Falcon 1 rocket shot spaceward from its Pacific island launch site at 9:10 p.m. EDT, but suffered a roll control malfunction 186 miles above Earth before completing its flight plan, its Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) builders said. The rocket was intended to end its mission about 10 minutes after liftoff at an altitude of about 425 miles.
“We did encounter, late in the second burn, a roll control anomaly,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told reporters, after the more than five-minute spaceflight. “But that’s something that’s pretty straightforward to address.”
The off-nominal spaceflight capped a drama-filled countdown that included payload communications glitches and one pad abort a half-second after the Falcon 1 rocket’s engine ignited. Each of those issues was eventually resolved, and the rocket -- initially targeted for a 7:00 p.m. EDT liftoff after a Monday scrub -- was again readied for launch within its four-hour flight window.
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