[FD3SA]

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 2013 1736 GMT (12:36 p.m. EST) "A NASA official says three Dragon thruster pods are required to approach the International Space Station."

Is there any chance of them getting all three thruster pods active? If not, will they have to abort the mission?

[rst]

There are four pods. One is working already, so they need to reactivate two of the three that are squelched. They have telemetry, and solar power, so that gives them time to work on the problem; battery lifetime is not a constraint.

But if they can't get this solved, the delivery can't happen, and the cargo is likely lost. They could try to recover some of it by bringing the Dragon down, and hoping the chutes work --- if they've got enough fuel and control to do that in a controlled way. But that would still result in the loss of the unpressurized cargo in the "trunk", which is separated and burns up on reentry, and also probably some time-sensitive experimental material inside the Dragon itself.

[FD3SA]

Is there any chance NASA will let them go ahead with two pods? I see that only two are required for full control of the craft, but I assume NASA wants three for redundancy in case of a failure.

[danielweber]

The latest is that Saturday's docking has been scratched. It takes about a day to get into position.

Dragon is still up there and orbiting and will probably continue to do so for several days without effort, so SpaceX still has an opportunity to fix what's wrong.

[pjscott]

Latest news is that they've got the problem fixed, but they're going to delay until Sunday to make sure.