NASA will make its second launch attempt of its “mega moon rocket” this Saturday (September 3), the space agency announced, just days after clearing the rocket’s first liftoff attempt after a problem with the motor.
The Artemis 1 rocket consists of the six-person Orion capsule perched atop the 30-story Space Launch System (SLS), dubbed the “lunar mega rocket,” and was initially scheduled to embark on its maiden voyage to moon and back on Monday (August 29). But engineers were unable to cool one of the four RS-25 engines in the rocket’s core stage to a safe temperature in time for launch. That problem, along with poor weather conditions, forced NASA to cancel the launch just two minutes into the spacecraft’s two-hour launch window, NASA officials said at a news conference on Tuesday (August 30).
The rocket’s new window for a second attempt will be Sept. 3, a day after the first available window on Friday (Sept. 2), which NASA ruled out due to a high risk of adverse weather conditions.
Related: Lightning strikes the launch pad of the Artemis I mission’s “Mega Moon rocket” during testing
“The launch pad time for a Saturday attempt would be 2:17 p.m. EDT,” Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, said at a news conference Tuesday. “It’s a two-hour window.” NASA officials added that if the rocket did not lift off on Saturday, another launch could be scheduled as soon as 48 hours later.
NASA sees this flight as the first of three missions that will be a vital test bed for the hardware, software and ground systems that are intended to one day carry the first humans. March and beyond. The upcoming unmanned Artemis 1 test flight, part of the Artemis program named after the twin sister of the ancient Greek god Apollo, will be followed by Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 in 2024 and 2025/2026 respectively. Artemis 2 will make the same journey as Artemis 1, but with a human crew of four, and Artemis 3 will send the first woman and the first person of color to land on the Moon’s south pole.
Monday’s launch was scheduled for 8:33 a.m. ET, but the attempt was plagued with problems from the start. Initial refueling attempts were delayed early Monday morning when lightning, which had already struck the Artemis rocket platform two days earlier, threatened to strike it again.
Then, not long after 3 a.m. ET, the launch team announced it was having trouble filling the rocket with supercooled liquid hydrogen fuel. These problems are reminiscent of those the team reported having during the April dress test, where a faulty helium valve and a leak of liquid hydrogen prevented the rocket from being ready to the point of ignition . Previously reported by Live Science. Another problem for Monday’s failed launch occurred when engineers detected a suspected crack in the rocket’s thermal insulation, though it was later deemed to be superficial.
The problem that ultimately slowed the launch came just after 6 a.m. ET, when the team said the liquid hydrogen fuel was only cooling three of the rocket’s four engines to sufficient temperatures before ignition. The problem engine, called engine three, appeared to be about 40 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) warmer than the minus 420 F (minus 250 C) temperature required for launch.
NASA will try to fix that problem for Saturday afternoon’s launch by performing the engine’s cooling procedure half an hour earlier, a trick officials say was effective during a successful test run last year.
And the engine may not have trouble cooling; NASA scientists have suggested that a faulty temperature sensor may have falsely reported that the temperature inside the engine was much higher and much further from flight readiness than it actually was.
“The way the sensor behaves doesn’t line up with the physics of the situation,” John Honeycutt, NASA’s program manager for the Artemis 1 mission, said at the press conference.
The faulty sensor cannot be easily replaced, and changing it would likely mean the rocket would have to be returned to NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building for a thorough investigation. Because that would likely mean delaying the launch by several months, Honeycutt said his team was looking to create a workaround plan that would allow flight engineers to make an “informed decision” about whether the rocket could lift off without taking sensor readings.
NASA is betting big on a successful mission for Artemis 1, which has come under scrutiny for a price that has risen to exciting levels. The program, which began in 2017, has already cost more than $40 billion to develop and is expected to cut US taxpayers $93 billion by the end of 2025, according to the inspector general’s office of NASA, Paul Martin, the space agency’s internal auditor. .
“Given our estimate of a $4.1 billion launch cost of the SLS/Orion system for at least the first four Artemis missions, NASA must accelerate its efforts to identify ways to make its related programs with Artemis are more affordable,” Martin said in March 1 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics. “Otherwise, reliance on such an expensive, heavy, single-use rocket system will, in our judgment, inhibit if not derail NASA’s ability to sustain its long-term goals of human exploration of the Moon and Mars”.
Despite these problems, NASA officials insist that the American public will find the cost of the rocket, which they say will usher in a new era of space exploration, to be justified.
“This is a new rocket. It’s not going to fly until it’s ready,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters Monday after the launch was cleared. “There are millions of components to this rocket and its systems, and needless to say, the complexity is daunting when you put it all at the center of a countdown.”
Nelson added that his own space shuttle launch, conducted in 1986 while he was a member of Congress, had four crashes before it finally took off.
“If we had thrown any of those bushes, it wouldn’t have been a good day,” he said.
NASA will be eager to launch Artemis before September 10, the peak date of this year’s hurricane season. No named hurricanes have formed so far this year, but signs of increased storm activity in the Atlantic basin suggest the unusual calm period may be about to end.
Originally published in Live Science.