Weather Could Cause Delay of SpaceX Cargo Mission Launch to ISS

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - SpaceX will launch the Dragon spacecraft carrying more than 5,600 pounds of supplies and experiments on one of its Falcon 9 rockets on the CRS-16 mission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said.

The unmanned cargo mission scheduled to be launched on Tuesday to the International Space Station (ISS) may be delayed for up to a day if the weather is not suitable, SpaceX Vice President Hans Koenigsmann said at a press conference.

"If there [are] delays because of the weather and we can't make the timeline then we'll stand down," Koenigsmann, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX said Monday at a NASA press conference at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Koenigsmann said there was still a 60 percent chance of the launch taking place on schedule at 1:38 pm local time (6:38 p.m. GMT) on Tuesday.

The scientific experiments carried up to the ISS on the mission include 36,000 worms that are expected to multiply to as many as three million during experiments to investigate how muscles are affected by a weightless environment.

READ MORE: Bacteria Likely to Soon Infect ISS Crew Found to Be Antibiotic-Resistant

Other experiments include a laser program to provide the first three-dimensional (3D) map of the trees in the earth’s forests and a program to store liquid methane for spacecraft refueling in space, NASA said.