After encountering a scheduling set-back due to the frigid weather impacting Florida, astronauts find themselves delayed again with the upcoming mission to fly around the Moon. During a “wet dress rehearsal” mission engineers found a fuel leak that needed to be rectified. Due to the mechanical issue discovered there, the latest planned scheduled rocket launch set for Superbowl Sunday, February 8, has been scrubbed. Now the earliest the rocket will launch is March 6.
NASA concluded a wet dress rehearsal for the agency’s Artemis II test flight early Tuesday morning, successfully loading cryogenic propellant into the Space Launch System (SLS) tanks, sending a team out to the launch pad to closeout Orion, the crewed capsule that sits atop the rocket, and safely draining the rocket. The wet dress rehearsal was a prelaunch test to fuel the rocket, designed to identify any issues and resolve them before attempting a launch. NASA says that to allow teams to review data and conduct a second wet dress rehearsal, they will now target March as the earliest possible launch opportunity for the flight test, taking February off the table.
Artemis is the follow-up series of missions involving the Moon from the Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s. According to Greek mythology, Artemis was the daughter of Leto and Zeus, and the twin of Apollo. She is the goddess of the wilderness, the hunt and wild animals, and fertility; Artemis is also considered as one of the helpers of midwives as a goddess of birth. The original Moon landing project was known as the “Apollo Mission.”
This upcoming Artemis II launch is part of a 10-day mission that will carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hensen on a free-return trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth. This flight will take the crew farther from Earth than any previous human mission before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at a record speed of approximately 25,000 mph. On January 18, the SLS rocket topped with the Orion capsule was rolled-out from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
NASA has emphasized that it will launch the astronauts only when all systems are ready, as safety comes before any schedule.
NASA has been extra cautious about launching rockets since the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster 40 years ago. Components of that spacecraft could not tolerate freezing temperatures which lead to a catastrophic explosion of the space shuttle shortly after lift-off, killing all on-board. Artemis II is using the same launch complex that Space Shuttle Challenger did on that fateful day January, 1986.
After Artemis II comes an even more ambitious mission: Artemis III will send the first humans to explore the region near the South Pole of the Moon.
And more ambitious yet will be Artemis IV, which debuts humanity’s first lunar space station, a larger, more powerful version of the SLS rocket, and a new mobile launcher.
