NASA officials said the agency will make a second attempt to launch its new powerful lunar rocket on Saturday, five days after an initial attempt failed due to technical problems.
The US space agency made the decision on Monday to postpone its first attempt to launch its unmanned rocket, which could take astronauts to the moon 50 years after the Apollo mission, due to engine problems, Russia Today reported.
Engineers at the launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, discovered problems with the RS-25, one of the four engines of the Artemis 1 rocket, and were unable to fix them in time for the scheduled launch window. Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, said Monday bad weather also played a role. He pointed out that the NASA team “agreed to postpone the launch date to the third Saturday of September.”
Managers announced on Tuesday that they had changed refueling procedures to deal with the problem, and suggested a bad sensor could be the reason for Monday’s launch.
Moving forward on Saturday’s launch will provide additional insights, even if the problem resurfaces and the countdown stops again, said NASA’s rocket program manager, John Honeycutt.
“Based on what I heard from the technical team today, what we have to do is keep looking at the data and fine-tune our plan on putting together the rationale for the trip.”
The 98-meter-long rocket, the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, remained on its platform at the Kennedy Space Center with an empty “Orion” capsule for the (future) crew above it.
The Space Launch System rocket will attempt to send the capsule around the moon and back. Only three experimental dolls will be on board. If successful, the experiment would be the first capsule to fly to the moon since NASA’s Apollo program 50 years ago.
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