The Moon will have to wait, and so will the more than 100,000 Americans that had gathered on the coast of Florida and the millions, perhaps billions, connecting from all over the world to witness the take-off of the new moon rocket of the Artemis program. The countdown was stopped when it scored -40 minutes and, after an hour, the flight director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson he decided to delete the launch for this day.
Something is wrong with the engine number 3, one of the four that push from under the central stage of the super rocket Space launch system. A malfunction that affects any possibility of take-off. Next opportunity: Friday 2nd September.
Artemis 1, launch canceled: the Italian Space Agency explains the reasons for the postponement
Lack of cooling
Two and a half hours from T-0, the NASA announcement: “We are trying to solve a problem with engine number 3”. We are in the phase where the engines a liquid propellant (hydrogen and oxygen) are cooled by letting liquid hydrogen flow into the circuits to prepare them for ignition.
The direct
Artemis 1, canceled today’s launch to the Moon. Problems with an engine
Only one of the four (# 3) had problems. Engineers have tried to close the pre-valves of the other three, in order to direct the hydrogen only in the one where the cooling did not take place correctly. Without success. Hence Blackwell-Thompson’s decision: to cancel the launch (“Call a scrub”). Whether it can be tried again after just four days (or seven, the other launch opportunity opens on September 5) will depend on the data that NASA teams are collecting from the rocket, and on any need to intervene. It could mean bringing it back to the Vehicle assembly building to be “taken apart” and fixed. And this would take several weeks.
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No test, it’s all a test
The “bleed” phase, the flow of hydrogen into the engine, had never been experienced, at least not completely. During the last test, in fact, the NASA had to stop the procedure due to a leak in the circuit. It happened to Junethere was no more time to perform a new “wet” test (“dress test rehearsal”), that is, filling the fuel tanks, without postponing again the take-off of the SLS and thus also the new adventure towards the Moon.
As the NASA administrator pointed out, Bill Nelson, on the NASA channel: “We do not launch until everything is in place. There are guidelines to be respected, the Space launch system is a very complicated machine and everything has to work. I have some personal experience, the crew I participated in canceled the launch four times (Bill Nelson flew into space with the Shuttle on the Sts-61-C mission, in 1986. Just ten days before the Challenger disaster ndr) – it is part of the space business, in particular of the tests, we are testing this rocket in a way never seen before for the safety of the crew “.
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Fly me to the Moon
Artemis I is the first mission of NASA’s new lunar program, in collaboration with the Canadian, European and Japanese space agencies. The first flight, lasting 42 days, plans to bring the Orion capsule, the first developed for a journey beyond the Earth’s orbit after the Apollo, to perform a few orbits around our satellite to test all systems, from navigation to the shield against radiation, up to the heat shield for the re-entry at very high speed (about 11 kilometers per second) into the atmosphere. Europe has a very important role in the program, the states that are part of the ESA have in fact designed and built the European service module, which is the engine and rudder of the Orion, to which it ensures energy and propulsion and contains the air tanks. and water for the crew.
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Recycled engines
The SLS is a very, very expensive example of recycling. As Jason Davis points out on the Planetary society website, the four engines of the central stage of the Space launch system are “Old” Shuttle engines let’s say, refurbished. So the side boosters are the same products for the transport system abandoned in 2011. So a launch system that has proved reliable, certainly, especially counting on the technical improvements made in the last decade, but whose cost is now estimated over 20 billion dollars for its development and about two billion at each take-off just for the launch cost.