A fuel leak and then an engine problem during final liftoff preparations led NASA to clean up the launch of the new moon’s powerful rocket on Monday morning in a shakedown flight with three test dummies. The next launch attempt won’t take place until Friday at the earliest. As precious minutes ticked by, NASA repeatedly stopped and started fueling the Space Launch System rocket with nearly a million gallons of supercooled hydrogen and oxygen due to a leak of highly explosive hydrogen at the same spot it had seen leak during a dress rehearsal. back in the spring. Then NASA ran into a new problem when it was unable to properly cool one of the rocket’s four main engines, officials said. Engineers continued to work to identify the source of the problem after the launch postponement was announced. “This is a very complex machine, a very complex system, and it all has to work, and you don’t want to light the candle until it’s ready,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Referring to the launch delays, Nelson said, “It’s just part of the space business and it’s part, especially, of a test flight.” The rocket was to lift off on a flight to propel a crew capsule into orbit around the moon. The six-week mission was scheduled to end with the capsule returning to Earth in a crash in the Pacific in October. The 322-foot (98-meter) spacecraft is the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, surpassing even the Saturn V that the Apollo astronauts rode. As for when NASA might make another launch attempt, launch commentator Derrol Nail said engineers are still analyzing the engine problem and “we’ll have to wait and see what shakes out of their test data.” No astronauts were inside the rocket’s Orion capsule. Instead, test dummies, equipped with sensors to measure vibrations, cosmic radiation and other conditions, were strapped in for the shakedown flight, meant to test the spacecraft and push it to its limits in ways they’d never attempted before. with people. . Although no one was on board, thousands of people blocked the shore to watch the rocket soar. Vice President Kamala Harris was among the VIPs who arrived for the event. Assuming the shakedown flight goes well, the astronauts will enter for the second mission and fly around the moon and back as soon as 2024. A two-person lunar landing could follow by the end of 2025. The problems seen Monday were reminiscent of NASA’s space shuttle era, when hydrogen fuel leaks interrupted the countdown and delayed a series of launches in the 1990s. Later in the morning, NASA officials also spotted what they feared was a crack or other defect in the center stage — the large orange fuel tank with four main engines on it — but later said it appeared to be just an accumulation of frost on a slot in the insulating foam. Launch manager Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and her team also had to deal with a communication problem involving the Orion capsule. Engineers were trying to figure out an 11-minute delay in the communication lines between launch control and Orion that appeared late Sunday. Although the problem was cleared up by Monday morning, NASA needed to know why it happened before committing to a launch. Regardless of all the technical obstacles, storms would ultimately have prevented takeoff. Dark clouds gathered over the launch site as Blackwell-Thompson stopped the countdown, with thunder echoing across the coast. —— The Associated Press Health and Science Section is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Science Education Division. AP is solely responsible for all content.
