During final liftoff preparations Fuel leaks were discovered threatening to postpone the launch of NASA’s mighty new moon rocket Monday morning on its shakedown flight with three test dummies aboard.
At the earliest until Friday the next launch attempt will not take place and could be delayed until mid-September or later.
NASA repeatedly stopped as precious minutes ticked away and started the fuelling of the Space Launch System rocket with nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen because of a leak.
Because of thunderstorms off Florida’s Kennedy Space Center the fuelling was already running nearly an hour late.
During a dress rehearsal back in the spring the leak of highly explosive hydrogen appeared in the same place that saw seepage.
The officials said, in June then a second apparent hydrogen leak turned up in a valve that had caused trouble but that NASA thought it had fixed.
On the core stage of the big orange fuel tank with four main engines on it what they feared was a crack or some other defect but they later said it appeared to be just a buildup of frost, NASA officials spotted later in the morning.
Engineers began studying the buildup. On a mission to put a crew capsule into orbit around the moon the rocket was set to lift off.
For the first time since the Apollo programme ended 50 years ago the launch represents a milestone in America’s quest to put astronauts back on the lunar surface.
After the repeated struggles with the first leak, the space agency would have to decide whether to go forward with the Monday morning launch, said Jeremy Graeber, NASA’s assistant launch director.
“To get to that point we have a lot of work”, Graeber cautioned.
The next attempt wouldn’t be until Friday at the earliest if NASA scrubbed Monday’s launch.
By NASA the 322-foot spaceship is the most powerful rocket ever built, out-muscling even the Saturn V that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. No astronauts were inside the rocket’s Orion capsule.
Instead the test dummies, fitted with sensors to measure vibration, cosmic radiation and other conditions, for the six-week mission were strapped in, scheduled to end with the capsule’s splashdown in the Pacific in October.
Thousands of people jammed the coast to see the rocket soar even though no one was on board. Vice President Kamala Harris was expected among the VIPs.
In NASA’s 21st-century moon-exploration programme the launch is the first flight, named Artemis after Apollo’s mythological twin sister.
As soon as 2024 for the second flight and fly around the moon and back astronauts will climb aboard by assuming that the test goes well. A two-person lunar landing could follow by the end of 2025.
When hydrogen fuel leaks disrupted countdowns and delayed a string of launches back in 1990, the problems seen Monday were reminiscent of NASA’s space shuttle era.
With a communication problem involving the Orion capsule, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director and her team also had to deal.
Between launch control and Orion that cropped up late Sunday Engineers scrambled to understand an 11-minute delay in the communication lines.
By Monday morning though the problem had cleared, NASA needed to know why it happened before committing to a launch.
Source:- https://bloggerstow.com/after-fuel-leaks-nasa-scrubs-launch-of-new-moon-rocket/
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