The first mission of the American return-to-the-moon program, Artemis 1, will have to be postponed until the spring in the Northern Hemisphere, NASA announced on Wednesday (2), attributing the delay to the large number of necessary controls. .
Initially, the mission was scheduled for the end of 2021, then February 2022, then March… Finally, NASA announced this Wednesday that it is “studying launch opportunities in April and May”.
Artemis 1 will not have an astronaut on board, but it will chart the course of the Artemis program, which should allow the United States to return humans to the Moon, including the first woman and the first black person.
It will be the first flight opportunity for NASA’s new giant rocket, the SLS. It will propel the Orion capsule to the Moon, where it will be launched into orbit before returning to Earth.
The launch’s grand dress rehearsal, originally scheduled for February, had to be postponed to March, the US space agency said.
As a consequence, the actual launch was automatically postponed.
For this test, the rocket must be placed on the launch pad, its tanks filled with fuel and the entire launch sequence performed.
The course of this dress rehearsal will then determine the exact date of the actual take-off.
The new delay is not due to a “specific” problem, Tom Whitmeyer, NASA’s head of exploration systems development, told a news conference.
“It could be something as simple as a scratch that needs polishing or paint that needs to be touched up. There’s a lot to do, it’s a huge vehicle,” he added.
The SLS rocket, fully assembled at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is nearly 100 meters tall.
A few months ago, an independent report from the space agency’s office of the Inspector General estimated that Artemis 1 would likely launch “in the summer of 2022”.
Source: Folha
