Lyra Martin Science 06.25.2022 09:Jun AM EDT

NASA's Artemis 1 Moon Mission Launch Date Might Be Set in August

NASA: Despite Leaks, Artemis 1 Qualifies Vital Fueling Trial — After a successful wet dress rehearsal, NASA officials are hopeful that the Artemis 1 moon rocket will launch in late August. Photo : Red Huber / Getty Images

Keypoints

NASA Sees Artemis 1 to take off next month even though some crews noticed a hydrogen leak.
Artemis 1, the SLS's first launch, will send an unmanned Orion on a month-long moon orbit.
Regardless of Artemis 1's wet rehearsal on Monday being far from perfect, NASA decides to proceed to prepare for its flight.

Artemis 1 Completed its First Preflight Despite Hydrogen Leak

Officials from NASA believe the most recent wet dress rehearsal of the Artemis 1 moon rocket was successful and are optimistic that the mission will launch as early as late August. The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket-topped Orion capsule known as the Artemis 1 stack is slated to roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on July 1 to undergo repairs and launch preparations.

Not everything went perfectly smoothly. The Artemis 1 team noticed a hydrogen leak during fueling on June 20, and they intentionally 'masked' data associated with the issue to let the countdown continue. (NASA officials said that such data would have raised red flags during an actual launch countdown.) This change meant the countdown was halted at T-29 seconds before liftoff instead of T-9 seconds as initially planned.

Uncreewed Orion Will Take Wing to the Moon and Back

An unmanned Orion will be sent on a trip around the moon that will last around a month as part of Artemis 1, the SLS's initial launch. The most recent holdup in the mission's progress was the rocket's flight certification due to unfinished fuelling experiments, a crucial component of the wet dress rehearsal, a three-day sequence of tests intended to determine a new vehicle's fitness for flight.

This first uncrewed flight of Artemis 1 might be approved sometime in August if the SLS' fourth wet dress rehearsal is successful. According to Space.com, NASA stated that it is still unclear when the rocket will receive approval for launch.

After the wet dress rehearsal is through and the data from the experiment has had a chance to be analyzed, the space agency won't establish an official date.

Artemis 1 Will Proceed to Launch Preparations, Says NASA

Midway through March, the Artemis 1 stack was moved from the VAB to Pad 39B at KSC in preparation for a wet dress rehearsal that started on April 1. The stack was returned to the VAB for repairs on April 25 after three different efforts to feed the SLS with cryogenic propellants during that endeavor failed. Although the most recent wet dress attempt, which ended on Monday (June 20), wasn't ideal, NASA decided it was good enough to move forward with launch preparations.

The space administration postponed Artemis 1's SLS wet dress rehearsal because of safety difficulties with ground equipment on the booster's mobile launching platform. They predicted several simulated launch countdowns, loading liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the SLS to take 48 hours. The Artemis 1 crew had challenges that delayed these actions.

The second wet dress rehearsal for Artemis 1 was held on April 12. After detecting a damaged valve on Artemis 1's movable launch lower, the team fed just the SLS core stage. The megarocket's fuelling fails nonetheless. When liquid hydrogen leaked from one of the 'umbilical' cables on April 14, technicians had to stop fueling the core stage.