We were supposed to be seeing the historic first crewed launch of Artemis II within the
next next week or so, but NASA’s first trip bringing people within spitting distance of the
moon in more than 50 years has been delayed, for now.
Monday’s wet dress rehearsal – a process where they roll the stacked rocket,
comprised of the mammoth Space Launch System, NASA’s largest rocket, topped with
the Orion spacecraft, onto the launchpad to go through a launch countdown – failed to
go off as planned.
“For me, the big takeaway was that we got a chance for the rocket to talk to us, and it
did just that,” Josh Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II Mission Management Team, said
during the Tuesday press conference announcing the delay.
The rocket certainly told them a thing or two. It started with the liquid hydrogen fuel.
During Monday’s dress rehearsal, launch teams discovered a hydrogen leak in the
rocket’s core stage while they were fueling it.
After numerous delays, they eventually managed to get the rocket filled up but subsequently found issues in the Orion spacecraft that will be toting four astronauts (three Americans and one Canadian) around the moon whenever Artemis II does lift off. Specifically, there was a problem with
a valve on the Orion’s crew module hatch where the astronauts will live and work during
their 10-day mission.
The wet dress rehearsal was supposed to replicate a launch day complete with fueling
the rocket with a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen and counting down to 33
seconds prior to launch. However, all told, they managed to complete fueling but
detected more hydrogen leaks and then the valve issue. The rehearsal countdown
finally ended with more than five minutes still on the clock.
In light of all of that, NASA has opted not to try and send the rocket up during its
originally scheduled launch window which opens Friday, delaying any launch attempts
until March at the earliest. As of now, they’re aiming for the next launch window, which
begins March 6.
But officials remain optimistic. Hydrogen leaks have been an issue for the spacecraft
since Artemis I made its uncrewed launch back in 2022, a reality that NASA officials say
has helped them be ready to sort out these latest leaks.
“With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman noted via tweet. “That is precisely why we conduct a wet
dress rehearsal. These tests are designed to surface issues before flight and set up
launch day with the highest probability of success.”
Meanwhile the four-person crew, comprised of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor
Glover and Christina Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, has
come out of a two-week quarantine while NASA engineers study their findings from
Monday’s rehearsal to sort out what went wrong.
The astronauts will go back into quarantine and then head to Florida a couple of weeks before the next scheduled launch. If the issues have not been resolved in time for the March window, agency
officials have previously noted that there are also launch windows available through April.
Whenever the quartet does liftoff, their 10-day trip is slated to take them around the dark
side of the moon. While they will not be entering lunar orbit, they will be the first humans
to make the 685,000-mile trip round the moon and back since Apollo 17’s lunar landing
in 1972.
If the mission goes well, Artemis II will also set the stage for Artemis III. Now delayed
from 2027 until 2028 at the earliest due to this and other delays, this mission’s aim will
be to actually land astronauts at the Lunar South Pole.