No SpaceX Falcon Heavy payload safe as NASA Psyche mission announces delay

The launch of SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket for NASA was affected by a seven-week delay after spacecraft engineers discovered a software flaw during initial processing.

Named after the strange metallic asteroid designed to explore it, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft completed its journey from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center launch facilities in late April. To this day, the Falcon Heavy is the first and only payload to actually reach the Kennedy Space Center since mid-2019. At the time of its arrival, it was somewhat unclear when the Falcon Heavy would finally end its three-year launch hiatus or what the payload(s) would be. that will be above the rocket for the event.

Three weeks later, both are still not clear, but now for different reasons.

On May 23, Spaceflight Now reported that it had received a written statement from NASA confirming that the Psyche launch had been delayed from August 1, 2022, to no later than (NET) September 20 “after ground teams discovered a problem while testing the software on the spacecraft.” The spacecraft to the payload handling facility at the Kennedy Space Center, teams have spent the past few weeks combing Psyche and making sure it survived the flight without a problem. At an unknown point, the engineers needed to run the spacecraft’s computers for extensive diagnostic testing. It is also possible that a late build of Psyche’s flight software was analyzed externally prior to the final installation.

Either way, something went wrong. For now, all NASA wants to say is that “there is a problem that prevents confirmation that the software that controls the spacecraft is working as planned.” Although it appears to be software-centric, such a vague statement fails to rule out the possibility of a hardware problem, which could help explain why NASA and the spacecraft team quickly chose to delay Psyche’s launch by more than seven weeks.