WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - SpaceX aborted a planned rocket launch from NASA's historic moonpad just seconds before lift-off on Saturday due to a technical issue.
The company was set to launch its 229-foot tall Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft from the 39A launchpad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission delivering supplies and science gear to the International Space Station.
The unmanned SpaceX CRS-10 mission launch was aborted with just 13 seconds remaining for the scheduled lift-off at 10.01 am ET due to a thrust vector control system issue that developed late in the countdown, the NASA said in its blog.
'All systems go, except the movement trace of an upper stage engine steering hydraulic piston was slightly odd,' SpaceX Chief Executive Office Elon Musk announced on twitter.
'Standing down to investigate.'
'If this is the only issue, flight would be fine, but need to make sure that it isn't symptomatic of a more significant upstream root cause,' he added.
The next potential launch opportunity is Sunday 9:38:59 a.m. EST, the company said.
It is the first SpaceX mission from the Cape Canaveral launchpad, which was originally built for the U.S. man-to-moon mission in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Hawthorne, California-based SapceX suffered a costly setback last year when a blast at its Cape Canaveral launchpad destroyed its Falcon 9 rocket and its payload.
Since then, the company had a successful launch of an Iridium communication satellite from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on January 8.
SpaceX hopes to fly U.S. astronauts in 2018.
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