Artemis will stay on the ground until repairs are complete and a new launch window opens at the end of September... or perhaps even late October.
NASA engineers held the countdown at T-40 minutes while troubleshooting for more than an hour. Finally, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson,. At a press conference the following day, members of the Artemis team suggested the apparent engine issue might actually have been a sign of a dodgy temperature sensor. “The way the sensor is behaving does not line up with the physics of the situation,” said John Honeycutt, the SLS program manager.
The launch was then pushed back to this weekend, with countdown procedures starting up again early Saturday morning. Anticipating challenges with the propellants, they began the chilldown process, including the kickstart test, about 45 minutes earlier during the countdown procedures. The launch team and weather officer confirmed that the weather was amenable to launch, despite a few intermittent rain showers.
But that’s when the hydrogen leak arose, after the oxygen had been mostly fueled up. “Hydrogen's difficult to work with,” said Jim Free, as associate administrator at NASA headquarters, during the post-scrub press conference. The leak seems to stem from a seal in the eight-inch quick disconnect, a fitting used for the liquid hydrogen supply line from the ground system. Eventually, it became clear that that fitting would have to be removed and replaced.
NASA may need to delay the Artemis launch until mid-October, to come after SpaceX’s Crew-5 launch at a neighboring pad—which has been postponed multiple times, too. That mission will bring two NASA astronauts, a Japanese astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut, Anna Kikina, to the International Space Station.
A rollback itself is not without risks, since the motion and vibrations can put stress on the rocket. But to minimize wear and tear, the rocket would move no faster than one mile per hour on a machine called “
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