The Artemis-1 missile launch was called off again on Saturday. Like Monday, the countdown to the launch of the SLS launcher for the Artemis-1 Moon mission in Cape Canaveral, Florida, was bumpy.
The rocket was supposed to take off at 20:17 Belgian time, with a difference of two hours.
Just like Monday, the countdown was episodic. There appears to be a leak in the tube carrying liquid hydrogen from the ground fixtures to the four first-stage engines. Refueling has been stopped for find the mistakes and resolve it to do. When the engineers thought they had a solution, refueling resumed.
However, the leak was still present and the refueling was stopped again. The third attempt failed again: the leak was still present. After some confusion about what to do, launch director Charlie Blackwell Thompson decided to cancel the launch.
Since the world’s most powerful launch vehicle is unable to take off on Saturday, there is another chance between 10 p.m. and midnight on Monday. If this is not possible, according to the technicians, the program will be postponed for a month, since the rocket will then undergo “maintenance” and leave the launch site for a few weeks.
As a test, the ejector had to hurl the unmanned Orion capsule toward the moon, as the first stage of man’s return to his natural satellite.
On Monday there was a problem cooling one of the four engines still from the Shuttle era.
NASA’s Artemi program aims to put humans on the moon again and have them back by 2025 at the earliest. There will be a woman and a person of color among them for the first time. NASA wants to achieve this step by step, by analogy with the Apollo program. The first mission is to circle the unmanned Orion capsule and return it around the moon to test the reliability of the systems.
