NASA suspends fuel load testing due to technical issue Scheduled to take place on Sunday as part of the rehearsal for the upcoming Artemis 1 lunar mission At the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“The teams decided to remove Tank operations for dress exercise Wet due to loss of ability to pressurize the mobile launcher,” the space agency explained in a blog post dedicated to Artemis.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft on board.
Without this capability, which prevents entry of dangerous gases, “technicians cannot continue to safely load fuel into the rocket’s primary stage and the temporary cryogenic thrust stage,” NASA added in a brief message. He stressed that “the next opportunity to continue the tanks is on Monday, April 4th.”
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This weekend’s rehearsal began on April 1, and included a full countdown to launch and the loading of 700,000 gallons of ultra-cooled liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant into the rocket’s tanks.
Artemis 1 is NASA’s first mission under the Artemis program, which aims to bring astronauts to the Moon by 2025. The first mission, for which a date has not yet been set, will be an unmanned flight around the Moon to test the space launch system and Orion’s crew capsule, which carries an experiment kit and a sensor-covered dummy.
Hours before the fuel payload was suspended, in the early hours of the morning local time (11:20 GMT), mission officials gave the go-ahead to continue general testing, once the missile was validated. He was not damaged by several lightning strikes on the Kennedy Space Center launch pad where it is located.
Four lightning strikes hit the area around Launch Pad 39B on Saturday, the first of which was relatively low energy and the fourth that was stronger and hit one of the three lightning towers.
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The missile is shielded from lightning by these turrets that are topped with a fiberglass mast and connected to a catenary cable that deflects impacts on the ground, according to the space.com specialist.
“One of the strikes last night was the most powerful we’ve seen since we installed our new lightning protection system,” Jeremy Parsons, deputy director of NASA’s Earth Exploration Systems, wrote via Twitter. “It hit a catenary cable running between the three turrets. The system worked very well and kept the SLS and Orion missile safe,” he added.
At the time of the lightning strikes, the center of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft at its tip were operating, but the side-mounted solid rocket boosters and a temporary cryogenic thrust stage were off, according to the information.
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