![]() The uncrewed Artemis flight is a crucial test mission designed to gauge the capabilities of the SLS rocket and six-person Orion crew capsule ahead of humanity’s planned return to the moon for the first time in half a century. Sarafin added that poor weather conditions at launchpad 39B at Kennedy Space Center throughout Monday’s window would also have precluded the launch taking place. ![]() “The team … also saw an issue with a vent valve at the inner tank, so the combination of not being able to get the engine three chilled down and then the vent valve issue caused us to pause today, and we felt like we needed a little more time,” he said. Sarafin said no decision could be made until mission managers conducted a readiness review beginning on Tuesday afternoon, noting that he did not believe the problem was with the engine itself, but in the bleed system that “conditions” it with cryogenic propellant and adjusts the temperature for launch. ![]() We just need a little bit of time to look at the data, but the team is setting up for a 96-hour recycle,” Mike Sarafin, Nasa’s Artemis mission manager, told a lunchtime press conference. They were unable to find a fix in time to meet a two-hour launch window that opened at 8.33am (1.33pm BST) on Monday, and afterwards were troubleshooting the issue to assess readiness for the next available opportunity, on Friday 2 September. Engineers at Nasa’s launch complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida, discovered the problem with one of the four core-stage engines of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket during overnight loading of 2.76m litres (730,000 gallons) of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel needed to send the spacecraft off on its 1.3m-mile, 42-day journey to the far side of the moon and back.
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