On Saturday, September 3, NASA aborted its second attempt to launch an ambitious test flight of its new moon rocket due to a persistent leak that caused a delay in fuelling. An enormous Space Launch System (SLS) mega rocket was to have carried the space agency’s Artemis 1 moon mission into orbit on Saturday at 2:17 p.m. EDT (1817 GMT), but the launch attempt was derailed by a hydrogen fuel leak discovered approximately seven hours prior to lift-off.
The fuel leak was constantly attempted to stop by NASA engineers during the countdown for Artemis 1. To reinstall the hydrogen fast disconnect connector, they initially tried warming the tank connector and cooling it with cold fuel. Engineers then tried to pressurise it again with helium before switching back to the warm-and-chill approach to stop the leak. They weren’t successful.
The second setback this week for NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission means the organisation won’t be able to launch again until at least Monday, September 5. And that’s assuming the leak’s source can be quickly rectified.
“We’ll go when it’s ready. We don’t go until then, and especially now on a test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in televised comments after the scrub. “This is part of the space business.”
The choice to skip the flight, according to astronaut Victor Glover, was “definitely the right call.” “This is not a let-down,” Glover told reporters here after the scrub. “This is understanding how these things work, these really incredibly complex machines that we want to try to integrate human beings in.”
The Artemis programme, which aims to send men back to the moon by 2025, has just completed its maiden test flight at NASA. The Space Launch System, NASA’s most potent rocket to date, and its Orion spacecraft are being tested without any humans aboard to ensure that both are safe for use by astronauts.
