Is a SpaceX Dragon Launch Imminent?
On the weekend Elon Musk posted this photo on his personal twitter feed with the tweet "Dragon spaceship and Falcon 9 rocket just completed final assembly at Cape Canaveral http://pic.twitter .com/4GrSr3VU" This begs the question, when is the launch date?
The original launch was sheduled for February 7th, but a January 16 press release delayed blast-off until "later this year." Publicly, no official date has been set for the new Dragon/Falcon9 launch. Elon Musk tweeted a response to the date question with, "if all goes well, be the first commercial spaceship to dock with the Space Station. T zero ~ end of April."
Yet with photos of completed rockets, one can only wonder if we'll be seeing the Merlin engines lit prior to the end of April. With SpaceX and his other ventures, Musk certainly has developed a flavour for surprise and apprehension when it comes to announcements. More importantly, the man loves to impress the public. All things considered, this writer is quite confident that SpaceX will be putting Dragon in orbit sooner rather than later - certainly before the end of April.
