Engine snag leaves Artemis launch in lap of gods
The motto of the Artemis mission has always been “We are going!” But yesterday, it was clear Nasa’s Mega Moon rocket was going nowhere, following a fraught eight hours in which there were weather delays, a suspected crack in the thermal casing, a hydrogen leak and, finally, a fatal engine cooling problem.
Just minutes after the lift-off window opened at 8.33am local time in Florida, launch director Charlie Blackwell-thompson decided to scrub the ascent, after engineers failed to find a solution to the coolant issue.
It is the latest complication to beset the Artemis programme that was due to launch last year, but fell behind schedule before being hit by a string of technical failures during dummy runs earlier this year.
Now, it appears that many issues are still to be ironed out, while new snags are only just emerging.
The cancellation was a blow for the thousands who had flocked to the beaches around Cape Canaveral to watch the first launch of the Artemis mission, which has been billed as this generation’s Apollo and is aiming to put astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2025.
At Kennedy Space Centre, the fervour had been clear to see. Cars, tents and campervans began arriving at around lunchtime on Sunday alongside the Indian and Banana rivers that separate the mainland from the cape.
Such was the mounting excitement that reporters and VIPS were advised to be at the press site at midnight, eight and a half hours before the launch window opened, to avoid traffic.
But problems started soon afterwards, when a lightning storm moved in from the south, delaying fuelling until it passed over.
Just as that system began to dissipate, a new weather cell was spotted in the north east and the green light to start filling the huge tanks was not given until 1.14am local time, leaving the launch an hour behind schedule.
Storms had dogged the mission all week, with one of the lightning towers surrounding the spacecraft suffering a direct hit on Saturday afternoon.
Launching in the volatile Florida summer is less than ideal, but technical issues earlier in the year left Nasa no choice but to try to get the Mega Moon rocket up before the weather got worse.
Just as the weather cleared up, the launch was affected by another worrying issue – a hydrogen leak similar to the kind seen during April’s “wet dress-rehearsal”, which caused the fuelling test to be scrubbed.
Although the problem was fixed, and the main tanks filled by 5am, a new crisis emerged almost immediately afterwards, with a suspected crack in the rocket’s thermal casing.
An investigation proved the issue was not fatal, but by then engineers had realised engine number three was not cooling down sufficiently despite being flooded with liquid hydrogen.
It emerged that the system had never been tested in rehearsals. With time running out, and no solution presenting itself, Nasa abandoned the launch. US astronaut Stan Love, an adviser for the mission, said: “I came
‘We’re going to play all nine innings here, we’re not ready to give up yet’
down here really hoping to see the smoke and fire but unfortunately we did not launch today. There was a problem with feeding cold gas into the engines before launch to prepare them for the shock of lighting and having all the propulsion suddenly flowing through them, they had to be in a very strict temperature range before they could do that.
“We’re not sure why, we’re not sure when we can try again.”
It is unclear whether the rocket would have launched even if all the technical issues had been solved as it started to rain around 8.30am. The Space Launch System rocket cannot fly in the rain, and there are many other weather and temperature constraints that could have scuppered lift-off.
At a press conference after the failed launch, Michael Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager, said the Nasa team was “not ready to give up” and hoped to succeed with a take-off on Friday.
Mr Sarafin told a Nasa press conference: “Friday is definitely in play. We really need time to look at all the information and we’re going to play all nine innings here, we’re not ready to give up yet.”
Bill Nelson, a Nasa administrator, said: “We don’t launch until it’s right. This is a very complicated machine, a very complicated system and all of those things have to work.
“You don’t want to light the candle until it’s ready to go. I have some personal experience in the crew that I participated in on the space shuttle, we scrubbed four times, and on the fifth try it was a flawless mission.
“This is just part of the space business and particularly a test flight, we are stressing and testing the spacecraft in a way that you would never do with a human crew on board.”
The earliest opportunity to launch again is 12.48pm ET on Friday Sept 2 or Monday Sept 5. Nasa said it would not be draining the rocket of fuel so that engineering teams could keep working on a solution to the cooling issue.
“We must wait to see what shakes out from their test data, and a decision will be made by the launch team about where to go from here,” said Derrol Nail from Nasa Communications.
But time is running out as Florida’s weather is only expected to get worse as it enters hurricane season. Four systems are brewing in the Atlantic, and weather forecasters said it was possible there could be named storms by the time the new window rolls around towards the end of the week.