Last night’s awesome Northern Lights are scrubbing rocket launches

For most of the nation last night, the Northern Lights, or officially named the Aurora Borealis, were visible in an awesome display. This is due to a powerful solar storm coming from our Sun; however, that same storm that’s causing the beautiful nighttime display is also causing issues for the space industry who are trying to get rockets launched.

The Northern Lights were seen as far south as Florida last night with dancing colors of red and the traditional green seen across the country. Normally these lights aren’t seen outside the most northern parts of North America, but when higher than usual solar activity is present, they can stretch much further south.

Over the last few days, our Sun has been outputting larger than normal amounts of charged particles in what are called Coronal Mass Ejections. These CMEs aren’t unusual, but it’s rare for Earth to be orbiting in the path of these particles spewed from the star’s depths.

While current levels are harmless to us humans, they can cause some issues to terrestrial power grids and in-orbit assets if proper actions aren’t taken. Luckily, these recent solar storms are not large enough to affect our ground electronics; some precautions are being put into place for space launches.

Blue Origin was expected to make its second launch attempt of its NG-2 launch with NASA’s ESCAPADE mission on top. This is the second launch of their New Glenn rocket and is an important step towards getting the vehicle operational and certifying it for national security missions. Due to last night’s and tonight’s expected solar storms, Blue Origin has delayed the launch of NG-2 until further notice.

Another company looking to fly a rocket this week is ULA. The recent weather report from the Space Force puts their ViaSat-3 mission later tonight at less than a 5% chance of launching due to high solar activity. The same can be said for ULA’s backup launch date of tomorrow.

Finally, SpaceX is hoping to fly at least one, possibly more, Starlink missions Friday night, which could make scheduling new launch opportunities difficult for the Eastern Range.

To add insult to injury, as of writing this article, the US government is still shut down. This has put pressure on US air traffic controllers and led to the FAA limiting rocket launches to be between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM local time. However, a short-term funding bill is up for a vote by the House today, and if passed, could reopen the government as soon as Thursday and last until January 30.