NASA, on Monday, postponed the much-anticipated launch of its giant new Moon rocket.
Report says, the postponement is due to fuel leak and engine problem during final lift-off preparations.
The next launch attempt is now scheduled to take place on Friday (Sept. 2) at the earliest.
NASA repeatedly stopped and re-started the fueling of its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with super-cold hydrogen and oxygen because of a leak of highly explosive hydrogen in the same place that saw seepage during a dress rehearsal back in the spring.
According to officials, NASA ran into new trouble when it was unable to properly chill one of the rocket’s four main engines. Engineers continued working to gather data and pinpoint the source of the problem after it was announced the launch was being scrubbed.
The Artemis 1 mission is a test flight of massive importance. The launch, which was originally scheduled for Monday during a two-hour window starting at 08:33 local time (14:33 CEST), will see an unmanned Orion module put into orbit around the Moon before returning to Earth 42 days later.
It will gather crucial data ahead of the next stages in the mission — a manned launch of the Orion module to lunar orbit, followed by the first mission to land humans on the Moon since 1972.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the scrubbed launch is “illustrative that this is a very complicated machine, a very complicated system, and all of those things have to work”.
“You don’t want to light the candle until its ready to go,” he added, reminding viewers on NASA TV he was in the crew of the 24th flight of the space shuttle, a flight which was delayed four times before it launched on the fifth try.
This is the first stage of the Artemis mission, which has the ultimate goal of establishing a long-term presence on the Moon’s surface.
NASA will launch an unmanned Orion spacecraft into orbit around the Moon on a test run to ensure manned missions are as safe as possible.
The Orion spacecraft will be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on NASA’s giant rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS).
It is, according to NASA, the world’s most powerful rocket, able to carry more payload into deep space than any other vehicle.
Standing at almost 100 m tall, the SLS can deliver 4 million kg of thrust. Two minutes into launch, two boosters will detach from the rocket, followed by the core stage (which acts as the backbone of the rocket, doing most of the heavy lifting).
These parts will fall into the Pacific Ocean, as the Orion spacecraft continues on course toward the Moon.
Orion will travel 450,000 km from Earth, and thousands of kilometers beyond the Moon over the course of the four-to-six-week mission.
“We’re going to stress it and test it. We’re going to make it do things that we would never do with a crew on it in order to try to make it as safe as possible,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on Wednesday.
Orion will be propelled towards the Moon by a service module provided by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The Orion spacecraft, which is 3 m tall, can seat four astronauts. A full-size dummy in an orange flight suit is going to occupy the commander’s seat for this flight, rigged with vibration and acceleration sensors. Euronews.
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