By Joey Roulette and Steve GormanWASHINGTON, July 2 (Reuters) – Weather and technical snags have forced NASA and its partner space company Katalyst to indefinitely postpone a first-of-its-kind mission to tow an aging U.S. satellite observatory into a safer orbit using a robot spacecraft, NASA said on Thursday.The closely watched mission, organized on a short-notice production schedule of just nine months, would mark a key test of an orbital-grappling technology with major implications for both the commercial satellite industry and the U.S.-China space race.AdvertisementAdvertisementBut the rare, airborne rocket launch designed to send the rescue spacecraft to orbit from a jetliner over the Pacific has been delayed repeatedly by weather and technical difficulties this week, leading the mission team to indefinitely postpone the flight.According to NASA, the latest unspecified issue was with the launch vehicle, a Pegasus XL rocket built by Northrop Grumman, which is supposed to carry Katalyst’s half-ton spacecraft, called LINK, into low-Earth orbit.LINK was specially built to save the $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory by latching onto the crippled satellite and toting it to a higher, sustainable orbit, potentially extending its mission by years.The observatory, also known as SWIFT, has no onboard propulsion capabilities and would otherwise drift naturally toward Earth and burn up in the atmosphere by later this year.AdvertisementAdvertisementKatalyst Space Technologies, headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, said it designed, constructed and tested the LINK vehicle on an unprecedented nine-month production schedule, under a $30 million NASA contract.Plans call for the spacecraft to be deployed from the payload compartment of the Pegasus rocket, which would soar into space after being released from …
