The course of true rocket science never did run smooth

I was wondering about the next Falcon 9 launch, and lo and behold, an
update from two days ago, when it was last scheduled, saying it is now
rescheduled for December 7th:

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches...ay-101109.html

"SpaceX is targeting December 7th for the first-ever fight of our
Dragon spacecraft, with the 8th and 9th as backup dates," Kirstin
Brost, a spokeswoman for the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company,
said in a Nov. 8 e-mail. "We are submitting our request to the
[U.S.] Air Force today."

There is some stuff attributing some of the shift to the delays with
Shuttle, but that may simply be a game of schedule chicken:

"We have assets tied to shuttle, but we also think that additional
testing on Dragon would be valuable," she said in a Nov. 8 e-mail
to Space News.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is still awaiting regulatory approval from the
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the mission. The
company submitted its license application more than a year ago,
but the FAA is still reviewing data on the Dragon capsule's
planned atmospheric re-entry.

rick jones
--
The glass is neither half-empty nor half-full. The glass has a leak.
The real question is "Can it be patched?"
these opinions are mine, all mine; HP might not want them anyway...
feel free to post, OR email to rick.jones2 in hp.com but NOT BOTH...

On 11/11/2010 2:16 PM, Rick Jones wrote:

Meanwhile, SpaceX is still awaiting regulatory approval from the
U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the mission. The
company submitted its license application more than a year ago,
but the FAA is still reviewing data on the Dragon capsule's
planned atmospheric re-entry.

...and you know, it's not like they intend to land the Dragon in Central
Park either...it's designed for a sea landing, and no matter if they go
one, two, or the hoped-for three orbits, they already know where they
intend it to come down at with a fair degree of accuracy.
Hell of a lot better than NASA did with Skylab, or will probably do for
the HST.
I still picture this red-hot giant glass Frisbee of a mirror gliding
down somewhere in Vanuatu, and being taken as a holy sign of John Frum's
imminent return: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
And who knows? With the price fragments of it could get on eBay, it may
well be a gift from John Frum to the people of those islands, as his
Holy Messenger - Tom Navy - predicted. ;-)

Pat