An 11th-hour technical glitch prompted SpaceX to postpone its planned launch on Monday of a new NASA space telescope designed to detect worlds beyond our solar system, delaying for at least 48 hours a quest to expand astronomers' known inventory of so-called exoplanets.
SpaceX halted the countdown a little more than two hours before its Falcon 9 rocket had been scheduled to carry the Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into orbit from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Space Exploration Technologies, as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private launch service is formally known, said on Twitter that the blast-off was scrubbed due to unspecified problems in the rocket's guidance control system.
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