SpaceX Cargo Craft Fails To Dock With Space Station, Will Try Again

By Rebecca Hersher

Early Wednesday morning, a space capsule carrying 5,500 pounds of cargo approached the International Space Station.

The SpaceX Dragon cargo ship was scheduled to arrive at the station around 6 a.m. ET. If all went as planned, astronauts Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency and Shane Kimbrough of NASA would use a robotic arm on the station to reach out and grasp the ship, pulling it in and locking hatches with it.

But that cosmic embrace was not to be.

Around 3:25 a.m. ET, according to NASA TV, the navigation system on the unmanned Dragon cargo ship detected an error. A number was wrong in its GPS software. The ship automatically aborted its mission. It was about three-quarters of a mile away from the space station.

The docking has been rescheduled for Thursday morning.

“It did exactly what it was designed to do, breaking out of a rendezvous approach when it saw an incorrect value,” said NASA TV commentator Rob Navias.

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