Launch of a Falcon 9 rocket and the $340 million Deep Space Climate Observatory mission, or DSCOVR, is tentatively targeted for 6:07 p.m. Monday.
There's a 40% chance of acceptable weather for the instantaneous launch window at Launch Complex 40.
The weather was perfect Sunday, but the radar issue forced the Air Force to say it was "no go" about two-and-a-half minutes before the planned 6:10 p.m. liftoff.
The radar was required to track the Falcon 9 rocket during its flight from the Cape, part of the 45th Space Wing's responsibility for public safety during launches from the Eastern Range.
"The radar was not going to be able to come back up online and be ready to support the flight in time," SpaceX's John Insprucker said during the company's Webcast. "So with that we had to call a hold."
"Prob good though," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said later on Twitter.
Musk tweeted that SpaceX could now replace a balky video transmitter on the rocket's first stage. He said the transmitter was not necessary for the launch, "but nice to have."
The DSCOVR mission will send a satellite a million miles from Earth to monitor solar storms that can damage satellites, power grids and infrastructure on the ground.
The mission was first proposed in the late 1990s by then-Vice President Al Gore, who was at Kennedy Space Center to watch the launch and met briefly with reporters.
"It's very exciting for me," said Gore.
The mission, originally named Triana, ran into political opposition that bumped it from a planned 2000 launch on the space shuttle Columbia, then forced it into storage in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
"This has been a long time coming," said Stephen Volz, assistant administrator of the NOAA Satellite and Information Service in Silver Spring, Md.
The satellite still carries two NASA Earth-observing instruments, including the camera Gore envisioned. Called EPIC, the camera will produce images of the full, sunlit Earth from 1 million miles away. Gore thought a continuous picture of the Earth available on the Internet would help raise environmental awareness.
NOAA determined it would meet the agency's needs for space weather forecasting, replacing the NASA research satellite known as ACE that has operated for 17 years, far longer than planned.
After the launch, SpaceX will make its second attempt to land the Falcon 9's first-stage booster on a platform roughly 370 miles down range. A first attempt at the experimental landing last month hit the platform too hard after steering fins ran out of hydraulic fluid too soon.
Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance at Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX, put the odds of success again at 50-50.
Because the satellite launch requires more fuel, the booster will return with a more aggressive trajectory and perform only two braking engine burns instead of three.
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