Private Commercial Rocket Launch Canceled by Weather

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE —  American Rocket Co. of Camarillo hoped to take a giant leap into the commercial race to space Thursday. Instead, it took a small step backward when bad weather and a mechanical problem scrubbed the company’s first rocket launch.

The rocket was to have carried two payloads on a 15-minute unmanned suborbital flight. One was a Defense Department chemical experiment and the other was a capsule designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But about 20 minutes before the 1:13 p.m. scheduled liftoff, there was lightning offshore, and the Air Force, which was supervising the launch, called it off. There was also a mechanical problem with the rocket’s roll thrusters, devices that help guide the rocket.

“It’s not a critical (mechanical) failure,” said George Whittinghill, American Rocket’s director of marketing. “The rocket could have flown without” the thrusters, he said. “The key problem was the weather.”

The company hopes to launch the rocket soon, possibly on Monday.

American Rocket is one of about half a dozen fledgling companies trying to make a go of it in the space industry. The companies eventually hope to launch low-cost payloads into Earth orbit, including medical and scientific experiments.