NASA believes that it will still be possible to carry out the launch of the new lunar rocket to place a manned capsule in lunar orbit on Monday, despite the detection of a fuel leak, according to the US space agency.
NASA Deputy Launch Director Jeremy Graeber said launch controllers were eventually able to reduce the leak to a safe and acceptable level, where it held steady as nearly a million gallons of fuel filled the large rocket’s center tanks.
Graeber explained that NASA still has a chance to launch this Monday morning, but won’t set a new liftoff time until the 10-minute hold countdown, when managers do a check. “We have a lot of work to do to get to that point,” Graeber warned.
The fuel leak detected on Monday interrupted the countdown to the launch of the test flight of the new rocket, without a crew, reappearing in the same place where another leak had already been overcome in a countdown test carried out in the spring, he explained. AP news agency.
Upon detecting the leak, launch controllers halted the supply operation, which had already been delayed by an hour due to thunderstorms off the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 98-meter-tall rocket is the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, surpassing the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the Moon half a century ago.
This test flight is intended to put a manned capsule into orbit around the Moon for the first time in 50 years. The launch is intended to put the Orion capsule into lunar orbit, which instead of astronauts carries three test dummies, and the lunar orbit mission is expected to last six weeks.
Even with no one on board, thousands of people prepared to watch the launch of the SLS rocket, which stands for Space Launch System.
US Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Orlando with her husband but had not yet made the road trip to Cape Canaveral for the launch when the countdown was interrupted, according to AP.
If today’s launch can’t move forward, the next launch attempt won’t be until Friday at best.
Fuel leaks derailed NASA’s countdown test in April, prompting a slew of repairs. The test was repeated with more success in June, but some leaks were also detected, and technicians said they wouldn’t know for sure whether the repairs would be enough until the rocket’s tanks were loaded today.
The Artemis I mission has suffered several delays that have meant that the budget for this test in lunar orbit has cost 4,100 million dollars (more than 4,130 million euros, at current exchange rates).
Launch manager Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and her team also had to deal with a communication problem related to the Orion capsule.
Engineers were faced with an 11-minute delay in communications between Launch Control and Orion that surfaced on Sunday. Although the problem was resolved on Monday morning, NASA said it needed to know the reasons for this situation before committing to a launch.
This first flight of NASA’s 21st century lunar exploration program, named Artemis in honor of Apollo’s mythological twin, suffered several delays that caused successive budget increases.
Following the Artemis I mission, NASA hopes in 2024 to deliver astronauts to the Moon’s orbit (Artemis II) in 2024, and to its surface (Artemis III) in late 2025. With the Artemis lunar program, NASA hopes to “establish sustainable missions. on the Moon from 2028, with the aim of later sending astronauts to Mars.
The departure for these lunar missions or for Mars will be carried out from a space station that will be installed in orbit of the Moon, the Gateway. Only American astronauts, 12 in all, were on the surface of the Moon between 1969 and 1972, as part of the Apollo program.
Source: TSF
