As of this writing, NASA has halted the countdown on the launch of Artemis I while technicians investigate a leak in the hydrogen fueling line that supplies the giant rocket’s equally giant fuel tanks. The tank was only 8% full when the leak was detected, and as of 10:40 ET, NASA has gone through the sequence of reconnecting the line three times in hopes of making a good seal. So far, it hasn't solved the problem.
The issue is especially frustrating because NASA’s massive Space Launch System that’s meant to ferry the Orion capsule on a multi-week test flight around the Moon and home again, breezed past this point on Monday morning, before a combination of bad weather and a sticking valve caused a postponement of the flight until today.
The launch window for Saturday is long enough to absorb the delays so far and there is a degree of flexibility built into the schedule. So far NASA has not scrubbed or delayed the launch. There’s been a very deliberate effort to not rush this flight, which represents the first launch of the SLS after an 11-year program that has suffered from long delays. However, with the Atlantic hurricane season cranking up, pressure to get this rocket off the pad soon is mounting.
Check back with this article for updates, and for coverage of the launch if it occurs.
NASA’s flight team is still discussing the situation. Weather is expected to be best near the end of the flight window, so if they can troubleshoot the problem, it would still be possible to go. However, the fact that the flight director has been handed a “no go” recommendation is a good indicator that the team believes it’s not possible to troubleshoot this issue without defueling the rocket.
Artemis Flight Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson has not scrubbed the flight. Instead, she is instructing the team to continue working toward a solution with hopes that there can still be a launch today. Stay tuned.
On some of NASA’s video feeds, you can see vehicles lining up to go to the rocket. That’s not a great sign of faith that this will be resolved today.
And that’s it. The Saturday launch has been officially scrubbed, detanking of the rocket is about to begin. The liquid oxygen tank loaded fully, but that issue with the quick connect of the hydrogen line just kept appearing.
There are still a single launch window this month in which Artemis can be launched to make it’s extensive and complex flight. That window is on Monday, Sep. 5.
If the issue with the fuel line can be debugged in the next day, it’s likely we’ll see NASA line things up for a Monday launch. If not, the entire rocket may need to be rolled back from the pad, delaying a potential launch by weeks.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson responding to the second scrub: “We’ll go when it’s ready.” He notes that on the Space Shuttle flight where he was a passenger, there were four scrubs before they flew.
Team is now meeting to determine whether Monday is possible, if not, Nelson says “it will be an October launch.” Probably middle October, since NASA has a crewed flight to the International Space Station scheduled for the first week of October.
Just a quick response to some comments: There’s nothing here that says this rocket is “junk” or that manned spaceflight is pointless. The kind of scrubs and delays in launching SLS are precisely the type seen with previous crewed missions. And uncrewed missions.
This isn’t just the first launch for SLS, it’s the first all up integration test for a wholly new rocket and for the complete Orion vehicle. NASA is being extremely careful. In the first scrub, it actually turned out there was nothing wrong with SLS at all. It was just a temperature sensor that was falsely reporting an issue with cooling the engines pre-flight. In this scrub, it’s one of the fuel line quick disconnects that apparently failed to seal correctly. These things happen, a lot more often than people realize, since most launches aren’t under this kind of scrutiny.
When I was down at Florida for the launch of the highly successful exoplanet observatory TESS, I hauled my tired self out to pad 40 twice for potential early morning launches, only to have both result in scrubs. It was only after I had exhausted my ability to hang around Cape Canaveral and driven back to Missouri, that they got it off the ground.
In U.S. spaceflight, scrubs happen frequently. They are a helluva lot better alternative than watching billion dollar vehicles fall from the sky like confetti.
As far as this mission goes, these are flight tested engines on a rocket that has already demonstrated on a test stand that it can fire for the full length of time needed to reach orbit. It’s a vehicle that very purposely is not a huge “throw it all away and start over” effort, but an evolution of decades of human space flight. There’s no reason to believe it won’t be successful.
And even less reason to screw things up by getting in a hurry now.
During tanking of the #Artemis I mission, a leak developed in the supply side of the 8-inch quick disconnect while attempting to transfer fuel to the rocket. Attempts to fix it so far have been unsuccessful. Stand by for updates. https://t.co/6LVDrA1toy
At 11:55 ET, the launch team submitted a status of “no go for launch” to the launch director. This could mean a second scrub will be announced soon. Stand by.