March 21 Launch Delayed For Unspecified Reason

The most recent delay of a SpaceX launch has the company's competitors launching something of a whisper campaign about the company's reliability.

SpaceX had been scheduled to launch the TurkmenAlem52E/MonacoSAT satellite March 21. But Barry Matsumori, senior vice president of sales and business development for SpaceX, said during a panel discussion at the recent Satellite 2015 conference that an "anomaly somewhere in another area of our factory" forced the delay. Matsumori said there was nothing wrong with the booster, but "we decided we were going to be careful."

The online site spacenews.com reports that representatives of other companies on the panel were quick to point out that they launch on schedule, while not mentioning SpaceX by name.“We do not have unexpected events before the launch,” said Arianespace chairman and chief executive Stéphane Israël. Lockheed Martin said president Steve Skladanek also said that his company's Atlas 5 "is one of the most reliable systems available to the commercial market space to deliver on time."

Matsumori said that one of the factors in SpaceX's launch schedule is launching only from Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, which is also used for other missions. Renovations of Launch Complex 39A, which he said would be later this summer, and additional capacity being built for the company near Brownsville, TX, will help alleviate the "schedule bottlenecks" in the future.

The postponed satellite launch, meanwhile, is now scheduled no earlier than April 24. It will follow the launch of a Dragon resupply mission to ISS aboard a Falcon 9 rocket scheduled for April 10.

(Images from file)

FMI: www.spacex.com