Reuters
Joey Roulette and Steve Gorman
Publication date: Sep 03, 2022 • 35 min ago • 4 min read • Join discussion
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CAPE CANAVERAL — Ground teams at the Kennedy Space Center on Saturday began fueling NASA’s next-generation giant rocket for its first unmanned test flight to the moon, five days after an initial landing attempt was thwarted by technical problems. The 32-story Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule were scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:17 p.m. program 50 years after the last Apollo lunar mission. (Graphic:
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The previous launch bid on Monday was halted due to mechanical issues. NASA says technicians have since fixed the problems. Weather is an additional factor beyond NASA’s control. The latest forecast had a 70 percent chance of favorable conditions during Saturday’s two-hour window, according to the US space force at Cape Canaveral. Before dawn, launch teams began the long, delicate process of filling the core fuel tanks with several hundred thousand gallons of supercooled liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant. Engineers stopped loading liquid hydrogen around 7:30 a.m., about an hour into the complex process, to fix a leak. If the countdown stopped again, NASA could reschedule another launch attempt for Monday or Tuesday.
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Named Artemis I, the mission marks the first flight for both the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule, built under NASA contracts with Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp, respectively. It also marks a major shift in direction for NASA’s post-Apollo human spaceflight program, after decades focused on low-Earth orbit with space shuttles and the International Space Station. Named after the goddess who was Apollo’s twin sister in ancient Greek mythology, Artemis aims to return astronauts to the Moon’s surface as early as 2025, though many experts believe that timeframe will likely slip. Twelve astronauts walked on the moon during six Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, the only space flights that have yet placed humans on the lunar surface. But Apollo, born out of the US-Soviet space race during the Cold War, was less scientific than Artemis.
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The new moon program has enlisted commercial partners such as SpaceX and the space agencies of Europe, Canada and Japan to eventually create a long-term lunar base of operations as a stepping stone for even more ambitious human journeys to Mars. SPACE FLIGHT ANXIETY TEST Getting the SLS-Orion spacecraft off the ground is a key first step. Its maiden voyage is intended to put the 5.75 million-pound vehicle through a rigorous test flight that pushes its design limits and aims to prove the spacecraft is fit to carry astronauts. If the mission succeeds, a crewed Artemis II flight around the moon and back could come as early as 2024, followed within a few years by the first landing of astronauts, one of them a woman, on Artemis III.
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Billed as the world’s most powerful, complex rocket, SLS represents the largest new vertical launch system NASA has built since the Apollo-era Saturn V. Barring last-minute difficulties, Saturday’s countdown should end with the rocket’s four RS-25 main engines and two solid rocket boosters firing to produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust, about 15 percent more than the Saturn V, sending the spacecraft hurtling skyward. About 90 minutes after launch, the rocket’s upper stage will push Orion out of Earth orbit on course for a 37-day flight that brings it within 60 miles of the Moon’s surface before traveling 40,000 miles (64,374 km) beyond from the moon and back to Earth. The capsule is expected to launch into the Pacific on October 11.
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Although there are no humans on board, Orion will carry a simulated crew of three – one male and two female mannequins – equipped with sensors to measure radiation and other stresses that real astronauts would experience. The spacecraft is also set to release a payload of 10 tiny science satellites, called CubeSats, including one designed to map the abundance of ice deposits at the Moon’s south pole. A top goal of the mission is to test the durability of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry as it hits Earth’s atmosphere at 24,500 mph (39,429 km/h), or 32 times the speed of sound, on its return from lunar orbit – much faster than more common re-entries of capsules returning from Earth orbit. The heat shield is designed to withstand reentry friction that is expected to raise temperatures outside the capsule to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 Celsius). More than a decade in the making with years of delays and budget overruns, the SLS-Orion spacecraft has so far cost NASA at least $37 billion. NASA’s Office of Inspector General has projected that the total cost of Artemis will reach $93 billion by 2025. NASA defends the program as a boon to space exploration that creates tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in commerce. (Reporting by Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Frances Kerry)
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