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In its fourth attempt on Monday, NASA has mostly completed a countdown trial for the rocket that will take astronauts to the moon.
But agency officials said it’s too soon to know if rehearsal will be enough for the rocket for the Space Launch System to launch the Orion capsule in a test flight with no astronauts on board.
Even if the training countdown had gone perfectly, the Artemis 1 mission would be unlikely to explode before the end of August. This flight will be the starting point for the United States to return astronauts to the lunar surface more than half a century after the Apollo 17 mission.
Located on a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the rocket’s propellant tanks are for the first time fully filled with 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen. Issues that occurred in the three previous attempts in April have been resolved.
“I think it was a very successful day and again hit most of the goals,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said at a news conference on Tuesday.
However, a new problem – hydrogen leak at the fuel line connector – has emerged. By heating the connector and then cooling it back down, the engineers hoped the gasket would change enough to stop the leak. This didn’t work.
During a real launch, this issue would be the end of the countdown for the 322-foot-long rocket.
But Monday’s exercise was what NASA calls a wet suit rehearsal—wet due to actual fuel flowing into the propellant tanks—it’s designed to work on glitches and procedures without the excitement of the engines firing and the rocket ascent into space.
When the countdown clock was paused at the T-10 minute, engineers devised a plan that a valve would be shut to stop the leak and the errors would be suppressed to allow the countdown to continue to test other rocket components and launch procedures.
Ms. Blackwell-Thompson approved the plans and the countdown continued until the countdown ended with 29 seconds remaining, as expected. Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were then discharged from the rocket.
On Tuesday, NASA officials said they should review the data to see what they might still need to do before they feel ready to launch the rocket. The Space Launch System and Orion, the astronauts’ overhead capsule, are key components for Artemis, NASA’s program to send astronauts back to the moon.
Still, NASA officials were ecstatic with the progress.
Filling the booster tanks and counting down this close to zero are key milestones, said Thomas Whitmeyer, NASA’s assistant director of joint exploration systems development.
“We look at the pieces of the puzzle to decide which are the pieces we haven’t made,” said Mr Whitmeyer. “But we’ve also put a lot of the puzzle pieces together, and at this point we have a pretty good idea of what the puzzle looks like.”
Three people tried wet suit rehearsal in April it’s all too early because of various problems.
this the rocket was taken back into a giant garage It was called the Vehicle Assembly Building, where technicians could diagnose and repair problems more easily. Ara also gave time for an offsite vendor to upgrade its nitrogen gas facility, which is used to clean up hazardous gases, to Kennedy Space Center. Interruptions in the nitrogen supply during two rehearsal trials delayed the countdown.
NASA may decide to do another wetsuit rehearsal, or may decide it has enough data, and take the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building one last time for final launch preparations, which includes installing a self-destruct mechanism inside to destroy the rocket. if something goes wrong during the flight.
The rocket would launch for Artemis 1, sending the Orion capsule on a long journey around the moon. It would then return to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and splash down for an ocean landing.
The second Artemis flight, scheduled for 2024, will have astronauts on board for a similar journey without landing on the moon. Artemis 3 will be astronauts’ first moon landing since 1972. NASA has proposed a 2025 date for this crewed voyage, but it could face further delays.
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