After the latest setback, mission managers decided to take the rocket off the pad and into the hangar for further repairs and system upgrades.
NASA’s New Moon rocket sprung another dangerous fuel leak on 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 down for weeks, if not months.
Monday’s earlier test launch of the 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful ever built by NASA, was also marred by hydrogen leaks, although smaller. This was in addition to leaks detected during countdown exercises earlier this year.
After the latest setback, mission managers decided to take the rocket off the pad and into the hangar for further repairs and system upgrades. Some of the work and testing can be done on the bearing before moving the rocket. Either way, it will take several weeks of work, officials said.
With a two-week launch shutdown period approaching in a few days, the rocket is now buried until late September or October. NASA will work around a high-priority flight of a SpaceX astronaut 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 on top.”
“Just remember: We’re not going to launch until it’s right,” he said.
NASA has already been waiting years to send the crew capsule atop the rocket around the Moon. If the six-week demonstration is successful, astronauts could fly around the moon in 2024 and land there in 2025. People last walked on the moon 50 years ago.
Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and his team had barely begun loading nearly 1 million gallons of fuel into the Space Launch System rocket at dawn when the large leak appeared in the engine section at lower part
Ground controllers tried to plug it the same way they handled earlier, smaller leaks: by stopping and restarting the flow of super-cold liquid hydrogen in hopes of closing the gap around a seal in the line of supply They tried it twice, actually, and they also pulled helium through the line. But the leak persisted.
Blackwell-Thompson finally stopped the countdown after three or four hours of futile effort.
Mission Manager Mike Sarafin told reporters it was too early to say what caused the leak, but it may have been due to an inadvertent overpressurization of the hydrogen line early 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 to three times.
During Monday’s attempt, a series of small hydrogen leaks appeared there and elsewhere on the rocket. Technicians tightened the fittings over the next few days, but Blackwell-Thompson had warned he wouldn’t know if everything was tight until Saturday’s feed.
Hydrogen molecules are extremely 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.
An even bigger problem Monday was that a sensor indicated one of the rocket’s four engines was too hot, although engineers later determined it was actually cool enough. The launch team planned to ignore the faulty sensor this time and rely on other instruments to make sure each main engine cooled properly. But the countdown never got that far.
Thousands of people who flocked to the coast over the long Labor Day weekend, hoping to see the Space Launch System’s rocket blast off, left disappointed.
The $4.1 billion test flight is the first step in NASA’s revamped Artemis lunar exploration program, named after Apollo’s twin sister 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 is 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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Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press