The first test flight of the space agency’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft is plagued by delays decades in the making
In and around Cape Canaveral, Fla., it’s all things Artemis. Colorful hand-painted placards proclaiming “Go Artemis!” adorn storefronts. Large temporary street signs carry launch-day traffic advisories. Astronauts, NASA officials and aerospace industry executives squeeze into bars, which are rife with chatter about NASA’s flagship human space exploration program.
Now, as agency officials continue to troubleshoot the rocket, the rhetoric has changed somewhat: They’re quick to reiterate that Artemis I is a test flight and a risky one at that. The rocket is, after all, a new machine—even if its design is based on space-shuttle-era technology. And the spacecraft on top is new, too.
That’s in contrast to companies such as SpaceX, which has prioritized reusable rocketry and has so far launched five rockets from Cape Canaveral since NASA rolled the SLS to the pad on August 16.
Sure enough, teams soon detected a hydrogen leak at the base of the rocket—the same type of issue they’d encountered during a wet dress rehearsal and the same kind of problem that frequently delayed space shuttle launches: over 30 years, NASA’s space shuttles scrubbed on average about once per launch—often because of hydrogen leaks.
A few days later, NASA officials announced that the chilldown procedure had probably been going just fine. The team had enough data to suggest that coolants were flowing properly, and engineers decided that the sensor reporting an anomalously high temperature was probably just faulty. They would make a second attempt without fixing it. “Is part of the plan ... to just ignore the sensor?” asked CNN correspondent Kristin Fisher during a briefing on September 1.
“Every time we saw the leak, it was a large leak that immediately exceeded our flammability limits,” said Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin during a September 3 postlaunch briefing. “They’re really thinking through all the possible scenarios that could occur and then very systematically using the data and information they have to determine which fault was most likely to occur,” Dumbacher says. “They’re doing all the right things.”
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