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| Photo Credit: AP. |
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s new moon rocket sprang another dangerous fuel leak Saturday, forcing launch controllers to call off their second attempt this week to send a crew capsule into lunar orbit with test dummies. The inaugural flight is now off for weeks, if not months.
The previous
try on Monday at launching the 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket,
the most powerful ever built by NASA, was also troubled by hydrogen leaks,
though they were smaller. That was on top of leaks detected during countdown
drills earlier in the year.
After the
latest setback, mission managers decided to haul the rocket off the pad and
into the hangar for further repairs and system updates. Some of the work and
testing may be performed at the pad before the rocket is moved. Either way, several
weeks of work will be needed, according to officials.
With a
two-week launch blackout period looming in just a few days, the rocket is now
grounded until late September or October. NASA will work around a high-priority
SpaceX astronaut flight to the International Space Station scheduled for early
October.
NASA
Administrator Bill Nelson stressed that safety is the top priority, especially
on a test flight like this where everyone wants to verify the rocket’s systems
“before we put four humans up on the top of it.”
“Just
remember: We’re not going to launch until it’s right,” he said.
NASA already
has been waiting years to send the crew capsule atop the rocket around the
moon. If the six-week demo succeeds, astronauts could fly around the moon in
2024 and land on it in 2025. People last walked on the moon 50 years ago.
Launch
director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and her team had barely started loading
nearly 1 million gallons of fuel into the Space Launch System rocket at
daybreak when the large leak cropped up in the engine section at the bottom.
Ground
controllers tried to plug it the way they handled previous, smaller leaks:
stopping and restarting the flow of super-cold liquid hydrogen in hopes of
closing the gap around a seal in the supply line. They tried that twice, in
fact, and also flushed helium through the line. But the leak persisted.
Blackwell-Thompson
finally halted the countdown after three to four hours of futile efforts.
Mission
manager Mike Sarafin told journalists it was too early to tell what caused the
leak, but it may have been due to inadvertent over-pressurization of the
hydrogen line earlier in the morning when someone sent commands to the wrong
valve.
“This was
not a manageable leak,” Sarafin said, adding that the escaping hydrogen
exceeded flammability limits by two or three times.
During
Monday’s attempt, a series of small hydrogen leaks popped up there and
elsewhere on the rocket. Technicians tightened up the fittings over the
following days, but Blackwell-Thompson had cautioned that she wouldn’t know
whether everything was tight until Saturday’s fueling.
Hydrogen
molecules are exceedingly small — the smallest in existence — and even the
tiniest gap or crevice can provide a way out. NASA’s space shuttles, now
retired, were plagued by hydrogen leaks. The new moon rocket uses the same type
of main engines.
Even more of
a problem Monday was that a sensor indicated one of the rocket’s four engines
was too warm, though engineers later verified it actually was cool enough. The
launch team planned to ignore the faulty sensor this time around and rely on
other instruments to ensure each main engine was properly chilled. But the
countdown never got that far.
Thousands of people who jammed the coast over the long Labor Day weekend, hoping to see the Space Launch System rocket soar, left disappointed.
The $4.1
billion test flight is the first step in NASA’s Artemis program of renewed
lunar exploration, named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology.
Years behind
schedule and billions over budget, Artemis aims to establish a sustained human
presence on the moon, with crews eventually spending weeks at a time there.
It’s considered a training ground for Mars.
Twelve
astronauts walked on the moon during the Apollo program, the last time in 1972.
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