NASA may make its fourth breakthrough in the launch of the huge lunar rocket Artemis 1 as early as next Thursday (April 21st), agency officials said.
Artemis 1 will use the new NASA Space launch system (SLS) Megarocket to send an Orion capsule on an unmanned voyage around the moon. The agency aims to launch the mission this summer and is conducting a series of crucial tests on Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to help the team and hardware get ready.
This test campaign, called the “wet dress rehearsal”, began on April 1 and was due to end two days later with SLS charging and some start-up countdowns. But a few technical problems prevented and delayed the wet dress and then the Artemis 1 team stopped operations to welcome the launch of SpaceX on April 8 at the private Mission astronaut Ax-1 from KSC site 39A.
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The team aimed to resume the test on April 11, but found a faulty valve on the mobile launch tower supporting the Artemis 1 stack. This problem postponed things by one day and made the team do it change the test procedure; they decided to feed only the main stage of the SLS, but not its upper stage.
Refueling began on April 14, but crew members halted the procedure after noticing that liquid hydrogen was leaking unexpectedly. (Liquid hydrogen is one of the two propellants used by SLS, along with liquid oxygen.)
So the Artemis 1 team also canceled this attempt, in general the third attempt to fill the SLS tanks. (The previous two came on April 3 and April 4.) But the team plans to return to the horse soon.
“We reserve the opportunity to try the wet clothing again next week,” said Mike Sarafin, head of the Artemis mission at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., during an interview with reporters on Friday (April 15th). “Thursday, the 21st, is somehow the earliest time the team feels comfortable doing this.”
The schedule is a bit difficult next week, however, as Sarafin and other NASA officials acknowledged; SpaceX is preparing for launches the Crew-4 astronaut mission for NASA at 5:26 a.m. EDT (9:26 a.m. GMT) on April 23 from 39A at KSC.
NASA and SpaceX want a 24-hour buffer between the wet dress of Artemis 1 and the takeoff of Crew-4, officials said during a various press conference on Friday. So, if tanking at the main stage of the SLS cannot be completed by the early morning hours of April 22, the Artemis 1 team will have to wait until Crew-4 comes down from the ground.
No decisions have been made in this regard, NASA officials said; The members of the Artemis 1 team are still analyzing the data from the test procedures performed so far and formulating their next steps. But Artemis 1’s SLS and Orion remain in good shape, they said. And they are hardly afraid of the problems that have arisen.
SLS has never flown before, so it’s hardly surprising to encounter a few issues during the test campaign. For example, it took five or six attempts at tanking to succeed space shuttle ready for its first flight in 1981, said Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program at KSC.
“I would say that for the first time we are in the family of our experience in the past [operations]”Blackwell-Thompson said at a press conference on Artemis 1 on Friday.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow it on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
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