The second time has not been the charm. The launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission has been postponed for the second time this Saturday after a leak was detected during the filling of the megarocket’s fuel Space Launch System (SLS), responsible for carrying the Orion capsulewhich although this trip is only occupied by three mannequins, will be the transport in which future astronaut crews (including the first woman and the first person of color) will return to the Luna. Thus, it is postponed again, for the moment without a specific date, the mission that must prove that the technology is ready to reconquer our natural satellite, which has not been visited by humanity since 1972.
From the beginning, there was a climate of skepticism about the possible success of this second launch, scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral (Florida), starting at 2:17 p.m. local time (8:17 p.m. Spanish time). “There is no guarantee that we will take off on Saturday, but we will try,” he said at a press conference on Thursday. Mike Sarafin, manager of the Artemis I mission. “The technical teams have done a great job in a very short time to get us here.” But the rocket, which has been the source of headaches with delays and cost overruns since it was first conceived about a decade ago, was back in trouble.
This time a new fuel leak during its filling, despite the fact that in previous tests at room temperature no failures had been reported. Engineers have tried to heat the tank connector and cool it with cold fuel to stop the leak, which was in a different location than the leak that was also detected on Monday. This stratagem has not worked, so the team has tried pressurizing it with helium and then going back to the heating and cooling method. All three attempts have failed. Finally, NASA has decided to postpone the launch for the second time in the same week.
The mission #Artemis I to the Moon has been postponed. Technical teams tried to fix a problem with a leak in the hardware that transfers fuel to the rocket, but the attempts were unsuccessful. We’ll hold a press conference later. https://t.co/gsouiojos9
— NASA in Spanish (@NASA_es) September 3, 2022
New dates: next days or mid-October
“We will fly when we are ready”, the NASA administrator repeated in a small intervention after the suspension of the mission, Bill Nelson. “Cancellations are part of the space program. My own flight was delayed four times », Nelson explained in reference to his time as an astronaut for the US space agency. In the subsequent press conference, those responsible for the space agency confirmed that the mission will not take off in the coming days and that there are still weeks to go until new dates are considered, although it is most likely that the launch will be scheduled again for the end of October.
accumulated setbacks
This first mission has had several setbacks from the beginning: already the general wet rehearsal -in which all the launch steps are carried out except takeoff- had to be repeated up to four times and was never completed in the established terms. originally.
Still, NASA decided to test the real launch last Monday, August 29. But the problems appeared already in the first hours of the day: the engineers detected a liquid hydrogen leak at the docking interface with the central stage of the rocket, although this time it was possible to solve it by manually cooling the liquid hydrogen, with which the operations continued. However, a failure in one of the main engines stopped the countdown at 40 minutes. SLS engines have to cool down before fuel flows into them; if not, the temperature shock would cause a sudden contraction of the metal parts of the engine. Three of the four engines ran normally, but number 3 failed the test, despite all efforts to fix it.
In the end, this problem, coupled with a crack in the foam insulation of a flange connecting the fuel tanks, caused the launch to be suspended. Subsequent investigations indicated that the engine cooling failure was due to a faulty sensor; They also fixed the SLS’s fuel leak and resolved an issue with the vent valve. However, all these efforts have not been enough for us to see the 98-meter-high SLS take to the skies on its way to the Moon.
From the Moon to Mars
This first mission is the debut of the SLS and the second trip of Orion, which was already in space in 2014. When it takes off, the rocket will leave the capsule on its way to lunar orbit, inside which there is still no crew, but there is various experiments that will try to reveal how the trip could affect future astronauts. Artemis II is scheduled to be launched in 2024, a mission that will be manned but will not land on the Moon. If Artemis III will do it, scheduled for no earlier than 2025 (although many experts point out that this is too ambitious a date). For now, this first mission has shot up to the €4 billion. Although the figures become stratospheric if we put on the horizon the date on which the following humans will set foot on the Moon: by then, spending will have increased to 93,000 million euros.
But the objective of Artemis is not only to bring the human presence back to our satellite; that’s just the short-term plan. In the medium to long term, the intention is to establish a lunar base that will serve as a springboard for even more ambitious astronaut trips to Mars, a goal that NASA officials have said will likely not be realized until the late 2030s. Ambitious objectives that, for the time being, have not been able to take off.