Gusty winds and a problem with valves on the first stage of United Launch Alliance’s Delta 4 Heavy rocket postponed the scheduled Dec. 4 launch of NASA’s Orion spacecraft on a critical early test flight.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...