NASA workers are once again preparing the agency’s new moon rocket for its first test flight, which will take place during a two-hour launch window beginning at 2:17 p.m. Eastern on Saturday.
“We’re going to show up, and we’re going to try, and we’re going to give it our all,” Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, said during a press conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the 32-story-tall rocket with a crew capsule on top is waiting to launch.
NASA’s first attempt to launch this rocket was called off on Monday morning after a sensor detected that one of the rocket’s four engines was not cooling to the proper temperature of minus-420 degrees Fahrenheit.
After investigating and troubleshooting the issue, officials determined that the engine was fine and that a sensor was giving a false temperature reading. “We know we had a bad sensor,” said John Honeycutt, the rocket’s programme manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
It’s been nearly 50 years since NASA launched a vehicle designed to transport humans to the moon. NASA has named its new moon programme Artemis after the Greek god Apollo’s twin sister and has promised to land the first woman and person of colour on the moon’s surface.
There will be no astronauts on board the Artemis rocket during its long-awaited first mission, but this flight will be a critical test of how NASA’s new vehicle will perform in space and on its fiery return to Earth.
Once this rocket successfully launches, it will send a crew capsule called Orion into orbit around the moon, coming within 60 miles of the lunar surface. After more than five weeks, it will return home and crash land in the Pacific Ocean on October 11.
The next flight of this rocket will transport people, but it is not scheduled until 2024. The agency hopes to land on the moon in 2025.
