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Comment by Laremere | Hacker News Reader

Specifically, there's thunderheads within their no-go radius, so weather called hold. Since it's only a 1 second launch window, there won't be a launch today.

Edit: Next launch window is tomorrow at 4:10pm eastern time. However the weather outlook isn't much better.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_commit_criteria#Falcon_9 within 19 kilometres (10 nmi) of an attached thunderstorm anvil cloud.

> 1 second launch window

Why is it so precise?

While it's possible to inject the dragon capsule anywhere and get it's orbit in line with the ISS, its much more economical to inject it really close to the ISS so they dont need to do as much work to finish the trip.

They need to launch when the orbital plane of the station is directly overhead. The earth rotates surprisingly quickly, so even a minute or two later the plane of Dragon's orbit would be far enough off from the plane of the station that a couple expensive inclination change maneuvers would be necessary to line them up again.

The earth rotates surprisingly quickly

Not so much the earth as ISS.

The earth rotates at 24900mi/day or about 1040mph.

The ISS, to maintain its orbit, travels at 17150mph or about 5 miles per second.

So in two minutes, it travels about 600 miles.

Yeah, but the window is short because you have to catch the orbital plane, not the ISS itself. Earth's rotation speed is the relevant number here for figuring out how fast that plane sweeps across the sky.

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