Cape Canaveral Sept. 3 (BUS): NASA’s New Moon rocket caused another dangerous fuel leak Saturday, forcing launch controllers to call off their second attempt to send a crew capsule into lunar orbit with test dummies.
The first attempt earlier in the week also marred hydrogen escape, but those leaks were elsewhere on the 322-foot (98-meter) rocket, the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built.
Launch manager Charlie Blackwell Thompson and her team attempted to plug the leak on Saturday the way they last did: stopping and re-flowing supercooled liquid hydrogen in hopes of clearing the gap around a seal in the supply line. They’ve tried it twice, in fact, and they’ve also washed helium through the line. But the leak continued.
Blackwell Thompson finally stopped the countdown after three to four hours of futile effort, according to the Associated Press.
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