As others have pointed out, the Falcon did exactly what it was supposed to do under the circumstances — it was a successful abort. It’s too bad that they have the three-day constraint for the next attempt. Hopefully there’s nothing wrong with the engine itself. They didn’t see this problem in the test firing a few days ago. But I wonder if there’s something about the geometry that causes the center engine to be a little higher pressure than the outer ones. If I were them, I’d be going back and looking at the pressures from previous flights and tests. If that’s the case, then the solution to this problem might be to just allow a slightly higher pressure on it.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s the story from Spaceflight Now. Looks like if they have another scrub on Tuesday, they won’t have to wait another three days — they can try on Wednesday. If they launch Tuesday, that means a docking attempt on Friday, right in the middle of the ISDC.

Here’s an article describing the pre-rendezvous testing that it will go through. This is misleading, though:

“This is pretty tricky. And also, for the public out there, they may not realize that the space station is zooming around Earth every 90 minutes, and it’s going 17,000 mph,” said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “This is something that is going 12 times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle. So it’s hard.”

The velocity relative to earth isn’t really relevant, and doesn’t make it harder. All that matters is the relative velocity between the spacecraft and the ISS. And that, of course, is what they have to demonstrate their ability to control.

[Update a while later]

More thoughts from Tom Jones.

As of this morning, I’ve raised over $1800 of the $7000 that I need for my space-safety Kickstarter project. Keep it coming, and thanks to all who have donated so far.

From Andy Chaiken.

Wayne Hale remembers working with him. I hadn’t realized that he’s been supporting SpaceX.

Wayne’s anecdotes remind me of how hard we had to fight at Rockwell to get computers in the eighties. “We got to the moon without word processors” were the famous words of my boss at the time (now retired, of course).