NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission won’t launch until May
An April launch is no longer possible for NASA’s Artemis 1, which will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon using the huge Space Launch System (SLS). And May could be difficult to hit as well, according to agency officials. “We continue to evaluate the May window, but we’re also recognising that there’s a lot of work in front of us,” said Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA headquarters in Washington.
Some of that work will involve analysing data from the Artemis 1 ‘wet dress rehearsal’, a crucial test that will take the SLS-Orion stack through many of the milestones it will hit on launch day. Like the launch, the wet dress rehearsal will take place on Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. SLS and Orion are scheduled to roll out to the pad from KSC’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in March. It’ll likely take about 12 hours for the huge vehicle to make the relatively short trek to the pad.
The May launch window runs from the 7th through the 21st. If Artemis 1 isn’t ready to go by then, the next opportunity comes from 6 through 16 June. The next window after that runs from 29 June through 12 July. These windows are limited for a variety of reasons: performance constraints on the SLS, the need to line the launch up properly with Earth’s rotation and the position of the Moon and the fact that the solar-powered Orion isn’t designed to fly through eclipses that last longer than 90 minutes, among other factors.