SpaceX called off its planned flight to the International Space Station early Tuesday because of rocket trouble.
The unmanned Falcon rocket was supposed to blast off before sunrise. But the countdown was halted with just over a minute remaining. SpaceX will re-attempt the launch Friday, Elon Musk, SpaceX's billionaire founder, tweeted.
It is scheduled for 5:09 a.m. ET.
Friday is the next available time slot for SpaceX to launch, NASA said.
Officials said the problem was with one of the two motors needed for second-stage rocket thrust steering. A thrust vector control actuator failed to perform as expected, NASA said.
If controllers had not aborted the launch, computers would have done so closer to flight time, NASA launch commentator George Diller said.
The Dragon capsule aboard the rocket contains 2,268 kilograms of supplies and experiments ordered up by NASA. That's the primary objective for SpaceX.
But the California-based company was to attempt an even more extraordinary feat once the Dragon is on its way: flying the booster rocket to a platform in the Atlantic. No one has ever pulled off such a touchdown.
The platform won't be anchored down and is 91 metres by 30 metres wide — though wings extend its width to nearly 52 metres.
Its instability and size will make the landing difficult, and the company predicts a 50 per cent chance of success — at most.
Despite the low odds of success, SpaceX says the company will be able "to gather critical data to support future landing testing." It hopes to eventually have the Falcon 9 descend on land rather than water.
Musk says recovering and reusing rockets could speed up launches and drive down costs.
A reusable rocket "is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access," according to the company.
The delivery was supposed to occur before Christmas, but was delayed because of a flawed test firing of the rocket engines. The test was repeated successfully, paving the way for Tuesday's try.
NASA's last contracted shipment ended in an explosion seconds after the October 28 liftoff from Virginia. That company — Orbital Sciences Corp. — has grounded its rocket fleet until next year.
Included in the Dragon's payload is the science project of a group of students from McGowan Park Elementary School in Kamloops, B.C. The four boys won a contest to get their experiment -- which will examine how crystals grow in the zero-gravity environment of space -- included with 17 other student projects on the trip to the space station. The students lost their original experiments when the Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket exploded shortly after takeoff.
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