I used to love watching shuttle launches, and they would sometimes delay missions a day or two due to weather, even if the rain/snow would be over in a few hours. Why couldn’t they just wait instead of delaying?
In: Planetary Science
Sometimes the launch window can be a short as a second, if you’re trying to get multiple satellites (I’m thinking of the Iridium satellites from quite a few years back) into specific orbits. In some cases, the more things you have happening at once, the tighter your window is for getting everything launched at the right time.
It wasn’t an issue with the space shuttle, but you can have public launch windows and actual launch windows. If you’re launching a classified satellite, you don’t want to announce to the world your exact launch window, as other nations could figure out what you were aiming for. Instead, you’ll have a public launch window of “we’ll be sending something up in this six-hour window on this date.”
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