Nahidul Rony
This marks the fourth time that the Axiom-4 launch mission has been delayed. The launch was postponed on June 11 due to adverse weather conditions.
The launch of the Axiom-4 space mission, which was to carry India’s Sudhanshu Shukla and three others to the International Space Station, was postponed again on Wednesday. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Ax-4 has been held at the space station since the launch to give SpaceX teams additional time to repair an LOx leak detected during a post-static fire booster inspection. We will share a new launch date once this is completed, SpaceX said in a statement on its official Twitter account.
A leak was detected in a cylinder pipe of liquid oxygen (LOx), the cryogenic fuel used in the rocket, during a routine test last Monday, causing some delay in fully resolving the issue.
Giving details about the delay, ISRO Chairman V Narayanan said in a statement, “As part of the launch vehicle preparation to verify the performance of the booster stage of the Ax-4 Falcon 9 rocket launch vehicle, a seven-second hot test was conducted on the launch pad. During this test, LOx leakage was detected in the propulsion bay. Based on discussions by the ISRO team with experts from Axiome and SpaceX, it has been decided to rectify the leakage and conduct the necessary validation tests before clearing for launch.
The Falcon 9 rocket is a partially reusable rocket. It separates from the first stage (booster) during a space mission and returns to Earth and can be reused after some repairs. This is the second trip of the booster used in the rocket that launched the Ax-4 mission. The rocket had previously flown on the Starlink mission in April this year.
William Gerstenhaber, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, announced the launch delay at a press conference on Monday evening (Tuesday morning IST). The cause and some other issues were discussed. The rocket.
“We discovered a few things during the static fire that we had to take a look at. We found an LOx leak that we had previously seen on this booster during its last mission entry and discovered that we didn’t fully repair the booster during the renovation or we didn’t actually find a leak at that time but when we got to the launchpad. We’re continuing to work on shooting it. Today (Tuesday) we should complete that renovation and we’ll get it back into configuration.”
Dana Weigel, NASA’s program manager for the International Space Station, said there is plenty of opportunity for the Falcon 9 Axiom-4 mission in June and July.
“In terms of launch opportunity, we have until June 30 and then after a short cut-out, we’ll resume in the second week of July. So, there’s plenty of opportunity to fly the rocket,”
