CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A new commercial spaceship will wait all week before aiming again for the International Space Station.
Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Cygnus capsule was supposed to arrive Sunday, four days after its launch. But the rendezvous was aborted because of a discrepancy in navigation data between the two vessels.
The Virginia company has developed and tested a software repair to sync up the two sets of GPS data. Different formats inadvertently were used for reporting time, said company spokesman Barron Beneski. NASA’s Bruce Manners, a commercial space project executive, called it a “very small, simple fix.”
Despite the quick remedy, NASA and Orbital Sciences agreed Monday to delay this second delivery attempt until at least Saturday. That’s because of an impending manned mission from Kazakhstan; it would have cut it too close and created too big a workload to squeeze in the Cygnus before then.
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