SpaceX sets March 1 for launch to ISS

U.S. commercial space company SpaceX says it has picked March 1 for the next launch of its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. The company requested the date from the Cape Canaveral, Fla., spaceport it uses for launching its Falcon rockets. It will be the third flight for a Falcon rocket to ferry a Dragon cargo capsule carrying food, supplies and scientific equipment experiments for delivery to the ISS, Discovery.com reported Friday. One of the Falcon rocket's nine engines shut down prematurely during the last launch on Oct. 7, but SpaceX said it did not endanger that mission and that they've identified the problem. "We've gotten to root cause and we've briefed that to our customer (NASA)," Garrett Reisman, SpaceX's Commercial Crew project manager, said. "Right now we're just making sure that all of our i's are dotted and our t's are crossed," he said. "we do intend to make that information more widely disseminated very, very soon." SpaceX says it's planning six launches from Cape Canaveral in 2013, three for NASA and another three for commercial clients, and also intends to conduct launches from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base in California sometime this year.