Florida, Feb. 3 (BUS): The launch of NASA’s Big New Moon rocket to the launch pad in Florida for final tests before the first flight takes off has been postponed for at least a month, until March at the earliest, the US space agency. Agency said on Wednesday.
NASA, which late last year targeted the takeoff this month of its unmanned Artemis 1 mission around the moon and back, has declined to give a revised launch date, but the delay could prevent a flight before April.
In a briefing to reporters, NASA executives said there are no significant specific difficulties slowing down their schedule, but rather a larger-than-usual amount of technical hurdles that must be cleared in preparing a large and complex rocket system for its first launch.
“It’s really what I would call kind of a to-do list for a whole bunch of things that we absolutely need to get done, and then we’ll be ready to roll out the car,” said Tom Whitemaier, NASA’s deputy assistant administrator. to Reuters.
NASA officials said workforce and supply disruptions linked to the recent surge caused by the COVID-19 infection led by Omicron were also factors that slowed the business.
At stake are the shared fates of NASA’s Heavy Lifting Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and crewed Orion capsule that will send aloft for the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the moon and eventually establish a long-range lunar colony. In preparation for sending astronauts to Mars.
The US Apollo program sent six astronauts to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, the only manned spaceflight not to achieve this feat.
In November, NASA announced that it would aim to achieve the first manned moon landing of Artemis, named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology, as early as 2025.
But the space agency has several spaceflight launch points you must meet before you get there, starting with the first successful flight of SLS and Orion, and now in the final stages of pre-launch preparations.
The high-rise spacecraft, a major milestone representing the public’s first glimpse of the newly assembled 36-story rocket and capsule vehicle in transit, was recently planned to be rolled out in mid-February.
Under the updated timeframe set Wednesday, the SLS-Orion will transfer to a giant crawler carrier in March — perhaps around the middle of the month — from the assembly building to Launch Pad 39-B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Once there, technicians will take about two weeks to prepare the launch vehicle for a “wet rehearsal” that involves fully loading the rocket’s fuel tanks with fuel and running it through a countdown simulator.
Then, NASA will return the SLS-Orion stack back to the assembly building for one final round of checks before officially setting a new target launch date.
NASA said in a statement on Wednesday that it is reviewing the launch windows for April and May, but the schedule could be delayed further depending on the outcome of the rehearsal.
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