The long awaited Falcon Heavy launcher, built by SpaceX, finally has a planned date for its maiden flight! The 70 meter tall, 12 meter wide, and, when fully fueled, 1.4 million kilogram rocket is set to launch on the 6th of February, at 18:30 GMT, from Launchpad 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida. There will be a 3 hour launch window, with a backup window set for the next day. This is not due to orbital requirements, as the payload is a dummy payload, but is rather set to be favourable to the SpaceX launch team.
Yesterday, I had bad news regarding space operations, and I wrote this post, but as it turns out, the faulty fixture, newly mounted in the repair work done to the CanadArm 2 of the International Space Station (which I also covered here), has been fixed. Astronauts were supposed to replace it again tomorrow, reverting to the old one, as they believed that it was an internal hardware problem. But engineers from the Canadian Space Agency and the robotic arm's builder, Maxar Technologies, developed a software update and resolved the issue, thus canceling the replacement tomorrow, and reverting to the old mission parameters, as a spacewalk was planned for tomorrow, regardless.
