The Artemis 1 moon mission had three tries.
The space agency called off the latest attempt to fuel up Artemis 1's huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, a crucial part of the mission's wet dress rehearsal, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A leak of liquid hydrogen, along with two propellants and liquid oxygen, was detected by the Artemis 1 team. That halted fueling activity, as well as other key wet dress procedures.
The core stage LOX loading will remain stopped and the team will keep the core stage LH2 tank at 5%. Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA's Exploration Ground Systems team at the Kennedy Space Center, said on his verified account that the team will not conduct terminal countdown activities today as planned and will assess next steps after today's operations.
NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission explained in photos
Artemis 1 will be the first mission of the Artemis program. Artemis 1 will send an uncrewed capsule around the moon in order to show that SLS and Orion are ready for crewed missions.
The wet dress rehearsal is one of the most important pre-launch steps. The multi-day test allows mission team members to practice many of the key procedures leading up to liftoff.
The Artemis 1 wet dress was supposed to be wrapped up on April 3. Efforts to load propellant into the SLS tanks were hampered by several technical issues. The test was delayed and aborted to accommodate the launch of the private Ax-1 mission, which lifted off from a neighboring pad at KSC on April 8.
The dress was supposed to be wet on April 11. The team decided to fuel up the SLS core stage, not the upper stage, after discovering a faulty valve in the mobile launch tower.
The mission team won't perform the scheduled simulations so the wet dress is not ending today. We will have to keep an eye out for the next steps of the agency.
NASA will not set a launch date until the wet dress is done and the data is analyzed, agency officials have said.
Artemis 2 is expected to launch astronauts around the moon in 2024. If all goes according to plan, Artemis 3 will land astronauts near the lunar south pole in the 20th century.
Mike Wall is the author of Out There, a book about the search for alien life. You can follow him on social media. Follow us on social media.
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