Cape Canaveral, Florida – A fuel leak halted NASA’s countdown to the launch of its new lunar rocket early Monday, resurfacing at the same spot that saw the leak during a spring rehearsal.
Launch controllers halted the tank’s operation, which had already been delayed by an hour due to thunderstorms outside. They slowly resumed the process to make sure it was indeed a hydrogen fuel leak and not faulty sensors, but the alarms forced another pause as the precious minutes in the countdown approached.
The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, surpassing the Saturn 5 that carried astronauts to the moon half a century ago.
If this test flight is successful, it will put a crew capsule into lunar orbit for the first time in 50 years.
There were no astronauts inside the Orion capsule above the rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Instead, three experimental dolls have been attached to a lunar-orbiting mission that is expected to last six weeks.
Even with no one on board, thousands of people thronged to the coast to see the Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket soar. Vice President Kamala Harris flew to Orlando with her husband, but didn’t make the hour’s drive to Cape Canaveral for the planned takeoff.
The next launch attempt won’t be until Friday at the earliest.
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Hydrogen fuel leaks marred NASA’s countdown test in April, prompting a slew of repairs. The demo was repeated with greater success in June, but that too saw some leakage. Managers said they won’t know for sure if the repairs are good until they attempt to load the missile’s tanks with nearly one million gallons of super-cold fuel on Monday.
Launch director Charlie Blackwell Thompson and her team also had to deal with a communication issue related to the Orion capsule.
Engineers were quick to understand the 11-minute delay in the lines of communication between Launch Control and Orion that surfaced late Sunday. Although the issue had been resolved by Monday morning, NASA needed to find out why it was happening before committing to the launch.
This first flight of NASA’s 21st Century Lunar Exploration Program, named Artemis after the mythical twin sister of Apollo, has been delayed by years. Repeated delays have led to budget overruns in the billions; This demo alone costs $4.1 billion.
Assuming the test goes well, the astronauts will board the second flight, fly around the Moon and return as soon as 2024. This could follow a two-person landing on the Moon by the end of 2025. NASA is targeting the Moon’s south pole.
During the Apollo 12 astronauts landed on the Moon from 1969 through 1972, with only a few days left. NASA is looking to create a lunar base during the Artemis period, where astronauts orbit in and out for weeks at a time. The next step will be Mars, perhaps in the late thirties or early forties.
Here’s a summary of the first flight of the Artemis program, named after the legendary twin sister of Apollo.
missile force
The new rocket is shorter and thinner than the Saturn 5 rockets that threw 24 Apollo astronauts on the moon half a century ago. But it’s stronger, packing 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of thrust. It’s called the Space Launch System rocket, SLS for short, but a less obvious name is still being discussed, according to Nelson. Unlike the simplified Saturn V, the new rocket contains a pair of belt boosters reconfigured from NASA’s space shuttles. The boosters will separate after two minutes, just as the shuttle’s boosters did, but they won’t be caught from the Atlantic Ocean for reuse. The primary stage will continue to shoot before separating and crashing into the Pacific Ocean in pieces. Two hours after liftoff, the upper stage will send the capsule, Orion, to the moon.
the moon
NASA’s high-tech robotic Orion capsule is named after the constellation, among the brightest of the night sky. At 11 feet (3 meters) tall, it’s more spacious than the Apollo capsule, where four astronauts are seated instead of three. For this test flight, a full-size dummy in an orange flight suit will occupy the pilot’s seat, fitted with vibration and acceleration sensors. Two other mannequins made of a material that mimics human tissue — the female head and torso, but no limbs — will measure cosmic radiation, one of the biggest dangers of space flight. One of the trunks is testing a windbreaker from Israel. Unlike the rocket, Orion has been launched before, making two orbits around Earth in 2014. This time around, the European Space Agency’s solar and propulsion service module will be connected via four wings.
flight plan
Orion’s flight is supposed to take six weeks from takeoff in Florida to the Pacific flight, twice as long as astronauts’ flights in order to tax the systems. It would take nearly a week to reach the moon, 240,000 miles away. After orbiting the moon, the capsule will enter a distant orbit 38,000 miles away. That would put Orion 280,000 miles from Earth, farther than Apollo. The big test comes at the end of the mission, as Orion hits the atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour on its way to its launch point in the Pacific Ocean. The heat shield uses the same material as the Apollo capsules to withstand returning temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But the advanced design predicts future Mars crews will return faster and hotter.
mobile
Besides three experimental dummies, the flight contains a large number of stowaways for deep space research. Ten shoebox-sized satellites will blast off once Orion blasts toward the moon. The problem is that these so-called satellites were installed in the rocket a year ago, and the batteries can’t be recharged for half of them as the launch continues to be delayed. NASA expects some to fail, given the low-cost, high-risk nature of these small satellites. CubeSats for radiation measurement should be fine. Also clear: A demonstration of a solar sail targeting an asteroid. In a tribute to Back to the Future, Orion will carry a few shards of moon rock that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collected on Apollo 11 in 1969, and screws from one of its rocket engines, salvaged from the sea a decade earlier. According to NASA, Aldrin will not attend the launch, but three of his former colleagues will: Walter Cunningham of Apollo 7, Tom Stafford of Apollo 10 and Harrison Schmidt of Apollo 17, the last man to walk on the Moon.
Apollo vs. Artemis
More than 50 years later, Apollo is still NASA’s greatest achievement. Using 1960s technology, it only took NASA eight years before its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, was launched, and Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon. By contrast, Artemis has actually lasted more than a decade, despite building on the short-lived Constellation lunar exploration programme. Twelve Apollo astronauts walked on the Moon from 1969 until 1972, staying no more than three days at a time. For Artemis, NASA will draw on a diverse group of astronauts currently numbering 42 and extend the time crews spend on the Moon to at least a week. The goal is to create a long-term lunar presence that would lubricate sleds to send people to Mars. NASA’s Nelson promises to announce the first crews of the Artemis satellite once Orion returns to Earth.
What’s Next
There is a lot to do before astronauts step on the moon again. A second test flight will send four astronauts around the Moon and back, possibly as early as 2024. A year or so later, NASA aims to send four more astronauts, with two of them landing at the Moon’s south pole. Orion doesn’t come with a lunar lander like the Apollo spacecraft did, so NASA hired Elon Musk to supply its spacecraft for the first lunar landing at Artemis. Two other private companies are developing suits for walking on the moon’s surface. The science-looking spacecraft will link up with Orion on the Moon and take a pair of astronauts to the surface and back to the capsule to go home. So far, the Starship has only gone six miles. Musk wants to launch the Starship around Earth on SpaceX’s Super Heavy Booster before attempting to land on the moon without a crew. One hitch: The spacecraft will need to be filled into an Earth-orbiting fuel depot, before heading to the Moon.
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