NASA canceled the launch of the rocket that was supposed to orbit the moon on Saturday, claiming a fuel leak delayed the mission a second time.
The leak occurred when liquid hydrogen was pumped into the rocket. NASA has not announced a new date for another attempt.
The launch of the orange and white moon rocket, which will be its first from launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, was scheduled for a two-hour “window of opportunity” that opened at 7:17 p.m. in Lisbon.
Just before 11 a.m. Lisbon, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson gave the go-ahead to fill the rocket tanks with fuel, but about an hour later a leak was discovered at the base.
Power was cut as the teams searched for a solution, but NASA eventually canceled the rocket launch attempt again.
Last Monday, the test flight of the SLS, docked at the top with the Orion spacecraft that will orbit the moon with three dummies on board, had already been postponed due to a fuel leak, valve failure and insufficient cooling of one of the four ships. main engines.
If it materializes, the launch of the SLS, which has been successively delayed over the years, will mark the start of the Artemis lunar program, with which the United States plans to return in 2025, a year later than expected. to the surface of the moon. the ground the first female astronaut and the first black astronaut. The last landing was about 50 years ago, in December 1972.
NASA plans to put astronauts back into orbit around the moon by 2024.
The 98-meter-high SLS is NASA’s most powerful rocket since Saturn V, which took astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972 as part of the Apollo program. Only American astronauts, 12 in total, have been to the moon.
Like the Saturn V, the SLS is not reusable, so new units will have to be built for new missions.
The new rocket, which is twice as high as the Santa Justa elevator, in Lisbon, will carry in its first mission ten scientific microsatellites (the size of a shoebox) that, after being dropped into space, will help the study of the effects of the radiation, an asteroid or the icy surface of the moon.
Partly reusable, the Orion spacecraft will stay in space longer than any other astronaut spacecraft without docking to a space station, and will return to Earth faster and warmer. The heat shield is the largest ever built.
Orion has a European module (from the European Space Agency, ESA) that will take it to its destination and back “home”, providing astronauts on future missions with light, water, oxygen, nitrogen and temperature control.
The dummies aboard the first mission have sensors to test the effects of radiation, acceleration and vibration.
The spacecraft will orbit the moon for a few weeks, after separating from the SLS rocket, in distant orbit before returning to Earth and docking in the Pacific Ocean.
The first mission of the Artemis program lasts a month and a half and serves to test the performance and safety of the SLS and Orion flight.
With the new moon program, NASA hopes to set up “sustainable missions” to the moon from 2028 to later send astronauts to Mars. The departure for these moon missions or for Mars will be made from a space station that will be installed in the orbit of the moon, the Gateway.
In Greek mythology, Artemis (Artemis in Portuguese) was the twin sister of Apollo (Apollo) and goddess of the hunt and the moon.
updated at 16.40
Source: DN
