Careless cruise ship scrubs SpaceX launch

Well, it happened again. The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of an Italian Earth observation satellite scheduled for January 30th was forced to scrub, this time as a cruise ship wandered close to the range 20 minutes before liftoff.

Avid launch tourists and space flight enthusiasts know just how frustrating it is to have a scrubbed launch. Anything from bad weather to tech malfunctions can be cause for a reschedule; and this launch has been scrubbed three times already due to weather alone. Making it worse, the weather on Sunday was near perfect, and pushing this launch back will be costly.

As is normal, the US Coast Guard maintained the normal “keep-out” zone around the launch area, and the US Military’s 45th Space Wing had warned boaters about the odd southerly launch trajectory. Regardless, Royal Carribean’s “Harmony of the Seas” was spotted heading into the keep-out zone 20 minutes before scheduled liftoff - and headed away 10 minutes later.

Port Canaveral and Coast Guard confirm the cruise ship that violated yesterday’s SpaceX launch hazard area was Harmony of the Seas, a Royal Caribbean ship. Investigation underway.

— Emre Kelly (@EmreKelly) January 31, 2022

Now as mentioned before, this launch had an abnormal trajectory, and we should remember that waterway is a major source of traffic from Florida to the Bahamas. So although the Coast Guard confirmed the Harmony was the culprit, it could have been any number of ships along the downrange area that was hundreds of miles wide.

Regardless of which boat broke the cordon, this scrubbed launch will cost SpaceX a couple hundred thousand dollars, and delay the launch until today (January 31st, 18:11 EST) if the skies are clear. This means SpaceX will be having a launch today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, making this week an extremely packed one for the company, and leaving no room for any more mistakes.

This of course isn’t the first time a watercraft forced a scrub, and with the keep-out zones routinely used by the public in between launches, it likely won’t be the last.