“We are going.”
That is the catchphrase that NASA is using in the lead-up to the debut flight of its new moon rocket, which could launch as early as Monday at 8:33 a.m. Eastern time. It is a phrase repeated by agency officials, added as a hashtag on social media postings and proclaimed on banners hung around the launch site at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If you are not a space buff, sending astronauts back to the moon might seem like a big yawn.
Why? We already went.
Why should NASA repeat what it did half a century ago, especially since astronauts will not actually step on the moon for several years, and by that time, NASA will have spent about $100 billion?
NASA officials today argue that the moon missions are central to its human spaceflight program and not simply a do-over of the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972.
“It’s a future where NASA will land the first woman and the first person of color on the moon,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference this month. “And on these increasingly complex missions, astronauts will live and work in deep space and will develop the science and technology to send the first humans to Mars.”
That’s a change from as recent as 2010, when President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the site where Americans launched to the moon and said NASA should aim for more ambitious destinations like asteroids and Mars and move beyond the moon.
“We’ve been there before,” Mr. Obama said.
Today’s program was named Artemis by NASA leaders during the Trump administration. In Greek mythology, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo. The program’s first step will be the upcoming test flight of the moon rocket, known as the Space Launch System, with the Orion capsule on top where astronauts will sit during future missions. This uncrewed flight, where Orion will swing around the moon before returning to Earth, is to wring out any issues with the spacecraft before putting people on board.
However, launch is not happening as multiple issues has arose.
Artemis 1 ran into trouble as team engineers noticed that one of the engines had an issue with the liquid hydrogen. The launch director had signed off on a plan to troubleshoot one of the RS-25 engines which was malfunctioning. But the troubleshooting plan did not work. The countdown clock was put on hold at T-40 minutes as the hydrogen team discussed options with the launch director.
The US space agency says it will try to launch its new Moon rocket on Saturday.
An attempt at a lift-off on Monday had to be scrubbed when one of four engines on the vehicle would not cool down to its required operating temperature.
After reviewing data, engineers believe they now understand why the issue occurred.
They think it is likely related to an inaccurate sensor reading and that they can develop a strategy to deal with the problem on launch day.
This involves starting the process of chilling the engines earlier in the countdown.
"We've got a path forward to get to where we need to get to, to support the next launch," said John Honeycutt, who manages the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket project at NASA.
Saturday's launch will be timed for 14:17 local time (18:17 GMT; 19:17 BST) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Controllers will be given two hours to get the rocket off Earth.
SLS is the biggest launch vehicle ever developed by the US space agency.
It's the modern equivalent of the Saturn V rockets that sent humans to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s - but with considerably more thrust off the launch pad.
SLS will send a big new crew capsule called Orion on a series of missions to the Moon under NASA Artemis programme. This first mission is called Artemis I and will be an uncrewed demonstration.
The reason for Monday's scrub was not related to the engine itself (Engine Number 3), but rather with the system that conditions it for flight.
The power unit mustn't be shocked by the sudden injection of super-cold propellants; it must instead be brought down slowly to the correct operating temperature (-250C) before launch by bleeding through some liquid hydrogen from the core-stage tank above.
On Monday, sensor readings suggested the engine was 15-20 degrees C short of where it needed to be.
Engineers believe the bleed-through system was working properly; it was just that the sensor system didn't accurately reflect real temperature conditions.
The engineering team plans to start the cooling process about 45 minutes earlier in Saturday's countdown, hoping this will bring everything into line.
"We are going to try to launch on the third (September). And, you know, coming into this prior attempt, yesterday's attempt, we said that if we couldn't thermally condition the engines we wouldn't launch, and that's the same posture that we're going into Saturday," said Mike Sarafin, NASA Artemis mission manager.
The weather forecast for Saturday is not brilliant. There is currently a 60% chance that controllers will encounter a violation of their launch criteria - principally showers. The SLS is not allowed to lift off in the rain.
But weather officer Mark Berger struck a positive note.
The scope of the coming 42-day mission is to send Orion looping around the back of the Moon before bringing it home for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off California.
A major objective of the test fight is to check the heatshield on the capsule can survive the heat of re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
NASA says it's going back to the Moon as part of a stepping stone to learn how to get to Mars. But researchers say there is also unfinished business at the Moon, scientifically. There is more we need to understand about lunar origins, and by extension the formation and early evolution of the Earth.
Future Artemis missions will target the lunar South Pole, where permanently shadowed craters hold reserves of ice.
You must be logged in to post a comment.