Nasa scrubs first test flight of moon rocket after engine fault

Bloomberg

Nasa delayed the debut launch of its new massive rocket due to an issue with one of its engines, dealing a temporary blow to the space agency’s plan to return to the lunar surface.
With Vice President Kamala Harris in attendance at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and a global audience watching online, the uncrewed Artemis I mission was called off at 8:34 am,
one minute after its originally scheduled liftoff time.
The launch missed its window after controllers were unable to resolve a temperature problem with one of the rocket’s four main engines. The rocket and space capsule are in “a safe and stable configuration,” Nasa said on Monday in a statement, adding that engineers were continuing to gather data. The earliest available opportunity to try again is on September 2, Nasa said in a webcast while announcing the scrubbed launch. No decision has been made on rescheduling.
Official confirmation of the delay came after the space agency spent the early morning hours investigating issues including a potential crack in material in the main body of the rocket as well as the temperature issue, officials said. Those came after engineers examined and resolved a suspected leak affecting the hydrogen tanking process.
The Artemis mission will be the first major flight in Nasa’s ambitious plan to send the first woman and the first person of color to the lunar surface as early as 2025. Artemis I is aimed at testing out the Space Launch System, made by Boeing Co., and a new deep-space crew capsule called Orion that was developed by Lockheed Martin Corp.
When Artemis I does launch, SLS will be sending Orion on a mission of more than five weeks, along with a host of payloads and sensors to track the journey. The capsule is tasked with inserting itself into lunar orbit and entering deep space before return to Earth in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego. Nasa plans to stress test the systems ahead of later crewed missions.
The Space Launch System already is more than five years behind schedule. It has been in development for roughly a decade, slowed by a myriad of delays and cost overruns. Development costs of the program have soared from an original $7 billion to about $23 billion, according to an estimate by the Planetary Society.
If successful, the Artemis program — named for the twin sister of the god Apollo in Greek mythology — will see the return of people to the moon for the first time in 50 years.
No one has visited since Apollo 17 in December 1972.