NASA’s Artemis I Moon rocket is in Launch Pad Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
NASA’s fourth attempt to complete a critical test of its Moon rocket has hit about 90 percent of its targets, but there is still no firm date for the giant’s first flight, officials said Tuesday.
Known as the “wet general test” because it involves loading liquid propellant, it is the last item to be spotted on the checklist ahead of this summer’s Artemis-1 mission: a lunar flight without crew that will eventually be followed by moon boots on the ground, probably not before 2026.
Kennedy Space Center teams began their final effort to complete the exercise on Saturday.
His goals were to load propellant into the rocket tanks, perform a launch countdown and simulate contingency scenarios, then drain the tanks.
Three previous bids, starting in March, were affected by errors and were unable to feed the rocket with hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen and supercooled liquid oxygen.
On Monday, engineers finally managed to fully load the tanks. But they also ran into a new hydrogen leak problem that they could not solve.
“I’d say we’re in the 90th percentile of where we should be in general,” Artemis Mission Director Mike Sarafin said Tuesday.
He added that NASA was still deciding whether it needed another test or whether it could proceed directly to launch. The agency previously said an August window was possible for Artemis-1.
NASA officials have repeatedly stressed that delays involving testing new systems were common during the Apollo-era space shuttle, and the problems affecting SLS are not of great concern.
With the Orion Crew capsule attached to the top, Block 1 of the Space Launch System (SLS) is 98 meters (322 feet) tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty, but slightly smaller than the 363-foot Saturn V rockets that propelled the Apollo missions. to the moon.
It will produce 8.8 million pounds of maximum thrust (39.1 meganewtons), 15 per cent more than the Saturn V, meaning it is expected to be the most powerful rocket in the world by the time it starts to operate.
Artemis-1 is scheduled to travel around the other side of the moon sometime this summer on a test flight.
Artemis-2 will be the first manned test, flying around the moon but not landing, while Artemis-3 will see the first woman and first person of color land at the lunar south pole.
NASA wants to build a permanent presence on the moon and use it as a testing ground for the technologies needed for a mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s.
NASA’s Artemis I moon rocket returns to Kennedy Space Center launch pad
© 2022 AFP
Citation: NASA’s rocket test of the Moon met 90% of the targets (2022, June 21) recovered on June 21, 2022
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