NASA's SPHEREx Will Now "Stand Down" -- No New Launch Date Set, Out At Vandenberg AFB... "Safety First" -- Always!

This is actually quite a proud moment. Far from a defeat -- this is a triumph -- for sensible, real science. . . over the "hope-ium" one Elon Musk regularly trafficks in, often with disastrous consequences.

[Note that twice now -- in this young new year, commercial airliners have all had to face ground stops throughout Florida -- for several hours, while the skies over the Gulf of Mexico rained his "rocket debris" (after explosions!) into the warm salt waters. We are mostly lucky that none of it made landfall.]

No. . . this is excellent: this is why we never lost a lunar mission, during Apollo: we DO NOT go, until everything is double-, and triple-checked -- and cleared by real, "ace-level" engineers. So it is, that between weather and other air traffic, we may not see a launch here until after St. Patrick's 2025. And that is the way it SHOULD be (per NASA):

. . .NASA and SpaceX are standing down for tonight’s launch of the agency’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions. The additional time will allow teams to continue rocket checkouts ahead of liftoff.

A new launch date will be announced once confirmed on the range. . . .

Hey Elon -- are you paying attention? Are you even awake yet, after losing an hour of sleep time last night?! Who knows. . . who knows? Onward.

नमस्ते