Observatory sets off on million-mile journey
SpaceX flight good on third try; landing test is aborted.
CAPE CANAVERAL — SpaceX launched an observatory inspired by former Vice President Al Gore toward a solar-storm lookout point a million miles away Wednesday.
The unmanned Falcon 9 rocket blasted off on the third try in four days, hoisting the spacecraft for NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Air Force.
Gore, who dreamed up the idea for an Earth-gazing satellite 17 years ago, returned for the sunset launch.
This time, the wind stayed within safety lim- its and everything else went SpaceX’s way, at least for launch.
But rough seas forced the company to cancel its effort to land the leftover booster on an ocean platform.
Waves towering three stories high crashed over the landing-zone platform floating 370 miles off the Florida coast. Making matters worse, one of four engines needed to keep the platform steady was not working.
With three hours remaining in the countdown, SpaceX called off the radical landing test of the first-stage booster. It would have been just the second such experiment; last month’s try ended in flames when the booster slammed into the platform, fell over and exploded.
On Wednesday, the booster, once free a few minutes into flight, still was going to attempt a “soft landing” in the ocean.
But it was not expected to survive given the harsh conditions.
The launch was unaffected by the cancellation of the test, a secondary, personal objective for SpaceX’s billionaire founder and chief executive Elon Musk.
Sending the observatory on its $340 million mission was the main event.
It represented the first deep-space mission for SpaceX.
NASA and NOAA pulled the sacked satellite out of storage nearly a decade ago, and retooled it to monitor solar outbursts while providing continuous pictures of the full, sunlit side of Earth.
CBS says longtime ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Bob Simon has been killed in a New York City car crash. He was 73 years old. The crash happened Wednesday in Manhattan. Police say a town car in which he was a passenger hit another car. Simon and the town car’s driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.
NEW YORK
A rookie police officer pleaded not guilty Wednesday to manslaughter, official misconduct and other charges in the shooting death of a man in a pitch-black stairwell of a Brooklyn public housing complex. Officer Peter Liang appeared briefly in a Brooklyn courtroom as the charges, which also include criminally negligent homicide and assault, were unsealed in the death of 28-year-old Akai Gurley.
CALIFORNIA
Amid an increasingly damaging labor dispute, 29 West Coast seaports that handle about $1 trillion of goods annually will be mostly closed four of the next five days. The announcement came Wednesday from the maritime association representing companies that operate marine terminals where dockworkers move containers of goods on and off massive ocean-going vessels; the containers are then distributed nationwide. Cargo has been struggling to cross the docks amid historically bad levels of congestion. Employers blame crowded docks on longshoremen staging work slowdowns; dockworkers say companies are exaggerating to cut their shifts.
ITALY
Some 300 migrants who tried to cross the frigid Mediterranean in open, rubber boats, were reported missing Wednesday by survivors as the U.N. refugee agency and other aid groups sharply criticized the new EU rescue operation as insufficient and costing lives.