Today, August 29, NASA specialists planned to send a super-heavy launch vehicle called the Space Launch System into space, which was supposed to deliver the Orion spacecraft into space. All this was part of the rather important lunar mission Artemis 1, in which the ship was supposed to fly around the moon and return to Earth with a lot of valuable data. In honor of such a grand event, live broadcasts were launched on the network so that everyone could watch the rocket launch in real time, but, as sometimes happens with space missions, everything did not go as planned.
NASA experts 40 minutes before the estimated launch time of the SLS launch vehicle stopped the launch process and reported that a hydrogen leak was detected during the rocket refueling. It is worth noting that the engineers conducted leakage assessments and came to the conclusion that in fact the loss of fuel is quite insignificant – this is not a critical problem, due to which it is worth stopping the launch. Accordingly, refueling into the compartments of the launch vehicle continued, but after some time the countdown to launch was stopped again. And, as it turned out, today it was the last attempt – now the launch of the SLS rocket was postponed to September 2.
Now NASA specialists will have to work hard – they need to find the problem and fix it before the next launch. Engineers, of course, tried to do this today so as not to endure such an important mission, but no one dared to rush to launch such a rocket either. At the same time, NASA officially announced that the launch of the SLS launch vehicle will take place only if specialists can find the problem and completely fix it. This means that if the leak is still present at the time of September 2, the mission will be rescheduled. And, perhaps, if the next launch window is not as close on the calendar as NASA would like, then the entire lunar program will have to be significantly shifted.
Source: Trash Box
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