The Artemis 1 team is still assessing its next steps.
The team aimed to resume the test on April 11 but discovered a faulty valve on the mobile launch tower supporting the Artemis 1 stack. This problem pushed things back a day and caused the team to; they decided to fuel only the SLS core stage, not its upper stage as well.
Fueling began on April 14, but team members halted the procedure after noticing that liquid hydrogen was leaking unexpectedly. So the Artemis 1 team also called off that attempt, the third try overall to fill up the SLS tanks. But the team plans to get back on the horse again soon. "We're preserving the option to reattempt the wet dress as early as next week," Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager at NASA headquarters in Washington, said during a call with reporters on Friday ."Thursday the 21st is kind of the earliest time that the team is comfortable with doing that."
The schedule is a bit tricky next week, however, as Sarafin and other NASA officials acknowledged; SpaceX is gearing up toNASA and SpaceX want a 24-hour buffer between the Artemis 1 wet dress and Crew-4's liftoff, officials said during a different news conference on Friday. So, if tanking of the SLS core stage cannot be completed by the early-morning hours of April 22, the Artemis 1 team will need to wait until after Crew-4 gets off the ground.
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NASA calls off 3rd attempt to fuel up Artemis 1 moon rocketMichael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, 'Out There,' was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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