SpaceX scrubs Sunday launch attempt, will shoot for Monday

SpaceX was aiming to send up the second of two Starlink launches from the Space Coast on Sunday morning, but scrubbed the attempt with less than a minute on the countdown clock.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 of the company’s internet satellites was targeting a 10:59 a.m. liftoff from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A at the end of a four-hour launch window.

Weather was clear and the SpaceX launch director gave the go for launch, but that was immediately followed by an abort callout with 46 seconds before liftoff.

SpaceX said in an update after the scrub that the vehicle and payload were in good health, and it would try again during a four-hour window that opens Monday at 6:37 a.m.

The first-stage booster for the mission is making its 17th flight and will attempt a recovery landing downrange on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas stationed in the Atlantic.

SpaceX was able to send up a successful Starlink mission flown from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Saturday.

If this mission does take off Monday, it would become the 57th flown from either KSC or Cape Canaveral among all launch providers, but SpaceX has been responsible for all but four of them. United Launch Alliance launches the others including the first Vulcan Centaur rocket, the final Delta IV Heavy rocket and two Atlas V rockets.

It would also be the 52nd Falcon 9 to take flight from the Space Coast with SpaceX so far having only flown Falcon Heavy once this year.

Upcoming launches for Elon Musk’s company include two human spaceflights: the Polaris Dawn mission no earlier than Aug. 26 returning billionaire Jared Isaacman to space and the Crew-9 rotational mission to the International Space Station no earlier than Sept. 24.

Crew-9 may only fly up with two astronauts if NASA makes the call to leave space to bring home two NASA astronauts who flew up to the ISS on Boeing’s Starliner instead of having them ride home on the spacecraft that’s in the midst of a certification mission, but faced thruster problems on the way up to the station.

Of interest, the Crew-9 flight will be the first human spaceflight from Canaveral’s SLC-40, as SpaceX’s normal pad for Crew Dragon launches at KSC will be unavailable starting in mid-September.

That’s because the second Falcon Heavy launch of the year will be in preparation mode for an Oct. 10 launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission aboard the powerhouse rocket.

ULA isn’t done with launches yet, either, with an early September target to send up its second ever Vulcan Centaur rocket. The Vulcan first stage for that flight, dubbed Cert-2, was raised into ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility adjacent Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41 on Saturday.

Cert-2 isn’t flying a customer’s payload, but is part of ULA’s attempt to be certified by the Space Force to fly national security missions, of which it has two planned before the end of the year as part of dozens on the books for Vulcan.

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