At lunchtime on Friday, things were not looking good: a rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station was having problems with its thrusters, imperiling its ability to get where it was going.
At stake were some treats for the astronauts — fresh fruit plus other food and clothing, parts for air purifiers and some science experiments — as well as the reputation of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, a company NASA has hired to ferry supplies to the space station (and, eventually, people). If the thrusters could not be fixed, the cargo would never arrive.
But the drama subsided quickly. By late Friday afternoon, SpaceX reported that it had fixed the problem and that the balky thrusters had merely delayed the arrival of the cargo ship at the station by perhaps just one day.
The launching had gone fine. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on schedule at 10:10 a.m. on Friday from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and 10 minutes later deposited the cargo ship — a capsule called Dragon — into orbit around Earth. The idea was for the Dragon, carrying 1,500 pounds of cargo, to adjust its orbit through a series of thruster firings and arrive at the space station on Saturday morning.
However, soon after the capsule separated from the rocket, engineers at SpaceX noticed that only one of the four groups of thrusters was ready to begin firing. NASA requires that at least three groups of thrusters be working before it will allow the capsule anywhere near the space station.
"It was a little frightening there," Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, said during a telephone news conference after the launching.
Mr. Musk said that there seemed to be a blockage or stuck valve, but that repeatedly opening and closing valves to the propellant tanks cleared the problem with the thrusters.
"They're actually looking quite good," he said.
Officials at NASA and SpaceX said they would discuss when to reschedule the space station rendezvous, which will now occur on Sunday at the earliest.
This was the biggest glitch that SpaceX has faced so far in its cargo flights. Last May, it made its first successful trip to the space station to demonstrate its readiness and followed up in October with the first delivery under a $1.6 billion contract for a dozen cargo deliveries.
The October mission was successful despite the failure of one of nine engines on the Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket's computer shut down the malfunctioning engines, and the other eight were able to compensate.
And Friday's cargo ship episode was not the only headache for NASA this week. Farther away, NASA's robotic rover on Mars, the Curiosity, also experienced a serious mishap. On Thursday, the rover put itself in "safe mode," when it discovered the memory in its computer had malfunctioned. The mission controllers switched to the other computer — the rover contains two for redundancy — and it will take several days before the rover resumes its scientific work.
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