It looks like the teams working on ATV are taking the launch delay in stride! Although there is a fair amount of work involved in replanning the ATV mission, delays are not out of the ordinary.

We received a number of emails overnight from several ESA team members confirming that ATV Johannes Kepler remains ready for lift-off. From ESA’s Nico Dettmann, Head of the ATV Production Programme, in Kourou: “The launcher authorities have been working over night to allow for a new countdown starting 16 February aiming at the 22:50:55 CET launch time.”

Charlotte Beskow, Nico’s deputy head, added: “Delays are not uncommon and it is something we all take into account and plan for.”

Here at ATV-CC, there was a thoroughly professional reaction to last night’s delay. Already last night, Jean-Michel Bois, Head of ESA’s Operations Management Team, was able to send a note stating:

After the launch delay announced by Kourou this evening, the ATV operational teams in Toulouse organised a special meeting to assess the effect [of the delay] on ATV-CC tasks. Each team has reviewed either the activities that must be re-done or re-planned or the new activities to be performed due to the new launch date. These include new orbital computations from the flight dynamics team, computing a new operations timeline and initiating coordination with the NASA TDRSS [relay data satellites] for communications. The ATV-CC team and our procedures were certainly prepared for events like this launch delay, and ATV-CC is fully ready to support today’s new launch attempt.