After technical issues, NASA targets next week for fourth test of Artemis moon rocket

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Engineers are reviewing data from the scrubbed Thursday test of NASA’s Space Launch System moon rocket, an operation that will likely need to be redone at Kennedy Space Center next week.

Teams are now targeting no earlier than Thursday, April 21, for the fourth attempt to fuel the 322-foot rocket’s core stage with liquid propellants during a test known as the “wet dress rehearsal.” A third try Thursday was scrubbed due to a hydrogen leak in ground equipment that supports the rocket at pad 39B.

“During attempt No. 3, we encountered some issues with cryogenic loading operations both on the hydrogen and liquid oxygen side,” Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, told reporters during a Friday teleconference. “We encountered a liquid hydrogen, or LH2, leak.”

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Already running behind schedule and constrained to working no more than 12 consecutive hours, managers and engineers decided to scrub the mock countdown. It’s designed to give teams experience, make changes to the timeline if necessary, and show the rocket’s technical readiness for launch of the Artemis I mission no earlier than June.

“After troubleshooting it, the team decided to knock it off for the day because when you have hydrogen leaks and ambient oxygen out there, you only need an ignition source to close the fire triangle, so it was a flammability risk,” he said.

If schedules hold, teams could try another modified version of the WDR on Thursday. It would include loading the first stage’s propellant tanks, but skipping the same process on the second stage due to previously discovered hardware issues. Those will need to be resolved after the rocket rolls back to the Vehicle Assembly Building.

Sarafin on Friday did not answer whether or not another rehearsal would be needed after the second stage issue is fixed, instead saying teams need to complete milestones one step at a time, then review the data. Previous attempts were scrubbed or delayed due to inclement weather and other hardware issues, most of which have been limited to ground equipment and not the rocket itself.

“The primary objective of the rehearsal is to demonstrate the ability of ground systems to perform these operations with the core stage,” Sarafin said. “Our ability to demonstrate both of these commodities (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen) under flight-like, ground-test conditions is what we’re really after here.”

“We’ve got some really complex physics going on. I would argue they’re PhD-level physics,” he said.

SLS is NASA’s newest rocket designed for deep space missions. Artemis is the agency’s official successor to previous programs like Apollo and the space shuttle, aiming to put two astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2025.

Artemis I, if the WDR goes well, is slated to fly no earlier than June without a crew. It will orbit the moon, then return to Earth for splashdown. Artemis II should do the same next year but with astronauts in the Orion capsule, while Artemis III plans to go all the way down to the lunar surface.

A Thursday attempt for the next rehearsal brings up some scheduling constraints: SpaceX’s next Starlink mission is set to fly from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on a Falcon 9 rocket at 11:16 a.m. ET that day. That’s several miles south of pad 39B and unlikely to cause immediate issues, but teams might have to alter their timelines.

The main concern around the Thursday timing is next door neighbor pad 39A, which is much closer to 39B: That’s where yet another Falcon 9 rocket is slated to launch a Crew Dragon capsule with four astronauts two days later. SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Crew-4 mission at 5:26 a.m. EDT Saturday with NASA’s Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, Jessica Watkins, and the European Space Agency’s Samantha Cristoforetti.

Crew-4 is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy Space Center – via private jet and in quarantine – Monday afternoon. They will spend about six months on the International Space Station before returning to Earth in their brand new Crew Dragon capsule named “Freedom.”

For the latest, visit floridatoday.com/launchschedule.

Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Technical issues force NASA to push test of Artemis SLS moon rocket