A series of mishaps has forced mission controllers to scrub today’s planned launch of the Orion spacecraft that could one day take astronauts to Mars.

NASA yesterday delayed the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour at least until the end of the week as work continues to resolve an electronics problem that scuttled Friday’s launch attempt, officials said.

Nasa slashed the asking price for its soon-to-be-redundant space shuttles from $42m (€29.19m) to $28.8m (€20m).