CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—On Saturday, teams on the ground at Kennedy Space Center got ready for a second try to launch NASA’s tall, next-generation moon rocket on its first flight. They hoped that engineering problems that stopped the first countdown five days earlier had been fixed.
The 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion capsule were set to take off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:17 p.m. EDT (1817 GMT), kicking off NASA’s ambitious moon-to-Mars Artemis programme 50 years after the last Apollo lunar mission.
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On Monday, when they tried to launch before, technical problems stopped the countdown and put off the unmanned flight.
Jeremy Parsons (NYSE:PSN), a deputy programme manager at the space centre, told reporters on Friday that tests showed technicians had fixed the leaky fuel line that caused Monday’s launch to be cancelled. The leaky fuel line was one of the reasons the launch was cancelled.
Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin told reporters Thursday night that two other major problems with the rocket itself—a broken engine temperature sensor and some cracks in the insulation foam—have been fixed to NASA’s satisfaction.
Weather is always an extra factor that NASA can’t change. The latest forecast from the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral said there was a 70% chance of good weather during the two-hour launch window on Saturday.
NASA could try again to launch on Monday or Tuesday if the countdown clock stops again.
The mission, called Artemis I, is the first flight for both the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule. Both were built for NASA by Boeing (NYSE:BA) Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.
It also means a big change for NASA’s human spaceflight programme after Apollo. For decades, the space shuttles and the International Space Station have been used to get people into low-Earth orbit.
Artemis is named for the Greek goddess who was Apollo’s twin sister. Its goal is to send astronauts back to the moon’s surface as soon as 2025.
In the six Apollo missions that took place from 1969 to 1972, twelve astronauts walked on the moon’s surface. This was the only time that humans had been on the moon’s surface before. Apollo, on the other hand, came out of the U.S.-Soviet space race during the Cold War. It was less focused on science than Artemis.
The New Moon Programme is working with private companies like SpaceX and the space agencies of Europe, Canada, and Japan to set up a long-term base of operations on the moon. This will be a step toward even more ambitious trips to Mars.
Related: NASA delayed the launch of the Artemis moon rocket owing to cooling issues.
An important first step is to get the SLS-Orion spacecraft off the ground. On its first trip, the 5.75-million-pound vehicle will go through a rigorous test flight that will push its design limits and, hopefully, show that the spacecraft is safe enough to carry astronauts.
If the mission is successful, a crewed Artemis II flight around the Moon and back could happen as soon as 2024. This would be followed by the first landing of astronauts on the moon, one of whom would be a woman, with Artemis III in a few more years.
The SLS is billed as the most powerful and complicated rocket in the world. It is the largest new vertical launch system built by the U.S. space agency since the Apollo-era Saturn V.
If there aren’t any last-minute problems, the countdown on Saturday should end with the rocket’s four main R-25 engines and its twin solid-rocket boosters firing up to produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust, which is about 15% more thrust than the Saturn V and will send the spacecraft shooting into the sky.
About 90 minutes after launch, the rocket’s upper stage will push Orion out of Earth orbit and set it on a 37-day journey that will bring it within 60 miles of the moon’s surface before sailing 40,000 miles (64,374 km) past the moon and back to Earth. On Oct. 11, the capsule is due to land in the Pacific Ocean.
Even though there will be no real people on board, Orion will have a simulated crew of three: one male and two female mannequins. Sensors will be put on these dummies to measure the amount of radiation and other stresses that real astronauts would face.
One of the most important goals of the mission is to test how well Orion’s heat shield holds up when it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 miles per hour (39,429 km per hour), or 32 times the speed of sound, on its way back from lunar orbit. This is much faster than the usual re-entry speed of capsules coming back from Earth orbit.
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The heat shield is made to withstand the friction of re-entry, which is expected to raise the temperature outside the capsule to almost 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).
NASA has spent at least $37 billion on the SLS-Orion spacecraft so far, which includes the design, construction, testing, and ground facilities. The spacecraft has been in development for more than a decade, and there have been years of delays and budget overruns. The Office of the Inspector General at NASA thinks that Artemis will cost a total of $93 billion by 2025.
NASA says that the programme has helped space exploration, created tens of thousands of jobs, and brought in billions of dollars in business.
