NASA Nears Second Attempt to Launch Artemis Moon Rocket on Debut Test Flight
Five days after a first attempt to launch a massive, next-generation moon rocket by NASA was unsuccessful due to technical issues, ground teams at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida started their final full day of launch preparations on Friday.
According to NASA officials, mission managers were still on track for a Saturday afternoon launch of the 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion spacecraft to launch NASA’s moon-to-Mars Artemis programme, which will replace the Apollo lunar missions from fifty years ago.
Jeremy Parsons, a deputy programme manager at the space centre, told reporters that tests performed Friday night revealed that technicians appeared to have fixed a leaky fuel line that contributed to NASA’s decision to halt Monday’s initial launch operation.
According to Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin, two other significant problems on the rocket itself, including a broken engine temperature sensor and some cracks in insulation foam, have largely been fixed.
According to forecasts, there is a 70% chance of favourable conditions during the two-hour Saturday launch window, which opens at 2:17 p.m. EDT (1817 GMT), as well as for a backup launch time on Monday, according to Melody Lovin, a launch weather officer for the U.S. Space Force in Cape Canaveral.
Lovin said, “The weather continues to still look pretty good for the launch attempt on Saturday. I do not expect weather to be a show-stopper by any means for either launch window.”
She continued, however, that the chances of cancelling a launch on any given day due to bad weather or any other reason were about one in three.
The SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft, which were constructed for NASA by Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., respectively, are making their first flights as part of the mission, dubbed Artemis I.
Orion will be launched by the SLS on a 37-day, unmanned test flight around the moon and back to evaluate both spacecraft before an astronaut-carrying mission is planned for 2024. The first woman to walk on the moon could return to Earth as early as 2025 if the first two Artemis missions are successful, according to many experts. However, that target date is likely to be pushed back by a few years.
The only spaceflights to date to land humans on the moon’s surface involved six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, during which twelve astronauts made moonwalks.
While the renewed focus of NASA on the moon is more driven by science and includes international collaborations with the space agencies of Europe, Japan, and Canada as well as with commercial rocket ventures like SpaceX, Apollo grew out of the U.S.-Soviet space race of the Cold War era.
The first woman to walk on the moon could return to Earth as early as 2025 if the first two Artemis missions are successful, according to many experts. However, that target date is likely to be pushed back by a few years.
The only spaceflights to date to land humans on the moon’s surface involved six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, during which twelve astronauts made moonwalks.
While NASA’s renewed focus on the moon is more driven by science and includes international collaborations with the space agencies of Europe, Japan, and Canada as well as with commercial rocket ventures like SpaceX, Apollo grew out of the U.S.-Soviet space race of the Cold War era.
An action like that would necessitate a delay that lasted longer than a few days or a week. With years of delays and escalating costs that reached at least $37 billion as of last year, the SLS and Orion have been in development for more than ten years. But according to NASA, the Artemis programme has also created tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue for the aerospace sector.
