SpaceX

[wickw50]

Louder-than-usual SpaceX test still planned; ISS launch pushed to early 2014

Posted: Thursday, August 15, 2013 9:56 pm | Updated: 10:50 pm, Thu Aug 15, 2013.
By JOSEPH ABBOTT [e-mail]
I haven't heard from SpaceX lately about the louder-than-usual test I got emailed about last week (my usual media contact is out of the country this week), but this did appear on the Twitter feed of the Waco/McLennan County Office of Emergency Management this evening:

So there's that. Meanwhile the space news website NASASpaceflight.com reports that SpaceX's next Dragon cargo flight to the International Space Station has been postponed from this December to next January, a move confirmed on the Goddard Space Center mission database.
Josh Byerly, a spokesman for NASA's ISS program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, couldn't confirm the shift but did note — as the NASASpaceflight report says — that the December date had actually been either-or, with both SpaceX and rival Orbital Sciences penciled in for cargo launches to the ISS although only one would be able to take the open slot on the station.
That call's now apparently been made, with Orbital's Cygnus cargo ship set to launch in the Dec. 11, 2013-Jan. 10, 2014, window from Wallops Island, Va., and Dragon set to launch in the Jan. 17-Feb. 16, 2014, window from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The NASASpaceflight report also says that NASA plans to take advantage of the extra launch-weight capacity offered by the upgraded Falcon 9-R, with January's launch set to take considerably more cargo up to the station than the last launch back in March aboard the previous-generation Falcon 9.
It should also be noted that this launch schedule might change depending on how Orbital's demonstration flight to the station, set for Sept. 15 from Wallops Island, goes.