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Florida, USA.- NASA on Saturday canceled the launch attempt of the long-awaited mission to send a rocket around the Moon due to mechanical problems, marking the second time the mission has been suspended in a week.
The launch was aborted due to a hydrogen leak in the engine cavity, which prevented NASA engineers from fully loading liquid hydrogen into the rocket.
The problem will need to be resolved before NASA’s Artemis I mission can take off. A similar leak was one of several problems that contributed to the space agency’s decision to postpone an attempt on August 29.
The mission, called Artemis I, is the initial step in NASA’s ambitious plan to send the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the Moon by 2025.
The goal is to show that the new Space Launch System can send an unmanned capsule called Orion into lunar orbit, before NASA feels comfortable putting astronauts on board.
After Saturday’s cleanup, NASA did not immediately specify a date for the next launch attempt. The first opportunity is Monday, September 5.
“Please understand, this is a test flight,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview before Monday’s aborted first launch attempt.
“They emphasize it and test it in a way that you would never do with humans on board. That’s the whole point of a test flight.”
Saturday’s launch attempt was more than a decade in the making. First conceived in 2010, the SLS was originally projected to launch in 2017.
But its development is long behind schedule, and its budget is skyrocketing as the rocket remains grounded. The cost of developing the rocket has ballooned from the original $7 billion to about $23 billion, according to an estimate by the Planetary Society.
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