During a long-awaited mission to send an unpiloted Orion crew capsule around the moon and back, NASA scrubbed its second attempt to launch Artemis 1 test flight.
In anticipation of favorable weather, engineers began fueling the Space Launch System rocket at 6 a.m. Saturday, setting up a launch window of two hours at 2:17 p.m.
As a result of this decision, launch will now take place at 11:18 Eastern Daylight Time, about 25 minutes after the team recommended that the launch be postponed because of the weather forecast.
Initially scheduled for Monday morning, the launch was scrubbed just as the launch window was about to open due to fueling problems.
To lift off the SLS rocket on behalf of NASA and its contractors. This will be the most powerful booster the company has ever built – 489 launch commit criteria will have to be met.
There are a lot of things that could keep us from getting off on any given day, mission manager Mike Sarafin told reporters on Thursday evening. The chances of us getting off (Saturday) are not guaranteed, but we’ll show up, try, and do our best.
NASA is Troubleshooting
NASA officials told reporters Tuesday that Monday’s launch attempt helped troubleshoot some problems, and that a second attempt might resolve additional issues.
Hence, the launch exercise served as a kind of real-time dress rehearsal for the actual launch, which hopefully would go smoothly and successfully.
SLS and the Orion astronaut capsule will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on the proposed third attempt, sending the Orion on a six-week test flight around the Moon.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Apollo lunar project launched NASA’s Moon-to-Mars Artemis program. But US human spaceflight efforts shifted from low-Earth orbit to low-Earth orbit with the International Space Station and space shuttles.
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