Woke up this morning to the disappointing news that the launch of the Dragon spacecraft was aborted at the last second — literally! — when computers detected pressure higher than the allowable limits inside one of the engines of the Falcon-9 booster. The engines had already fired and the ship was a half-second from lift-off when the shutdown occurred. This sort of thing isn’t uncommon in spaceflight operations — the shuttle Discovery had a similar shutdown on its very first mission, as I recall, and of course SpaceX’s equipment is still very new and likely filled with undiscovered bugs — but I was hoping for a different outcome. I find I really want these guys to succeed. Like I said the other day, I think the company’s story of coming out of nowhere and in only a few short years being on the verge of doing what no other private company has ever done is exciting and inspiring… and of course the sooner they succeed with the unmanned cargo runs, the sooner they can get the Dragon rated for human flight and the sooner the future will resume. At least that’s how I see it.

SpaceX technicians are inspecting the faulty engine now and are supposed to issue a detailed statement about what went wrong later today. The next available launch window that will allow Dragon to catch up to the space station is on Tuesday, May 22nd.

UPDATE: According to the latest tweet from SpaceX, the problem was a faulty valve in Engine #5. (The first of the Falcon-9 rocket’s two stages has nine engines arranged in rows of three, hence the number designation. There’s also a smaller Falcon-1, and a  design for a so-far unbuilt Falcon-Heavy, which will triple the engine count for lifting really large stuff.) The engineers will replace that valve tonight, and shoot for another launch attempt at 3:44 AM Eastern time, Tuesday morning.