NASA's Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft at Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday.GREGG NEWTON/AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. space agency, NASA, has announced that it will attempt the first crewed flight to the moon in 53 years next month, after a successful test of launch procedures on Thursday.
The goal of Artemis II is to send four astronauts, including Canada’s Colonel Jeremy Hansen, on a looping trajectory around the moon’s far side. During the 10-day trip, crew members will monitor the performance of their Orion crew capsule and help pave the way for future operations in lunar orbit and on the moon’s surface.
Currently, the capsule is sitting atop a 98-metre tall SLS rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
When the rocket was rolled to its launch pad in mid-January, NASA was aiming for a February departure for Artemis II. But leaking hydrogen fuel during a “wet dress rehearsal” on Feb. 2 caused mission managers to postpone the launch in order to deal with the problem.
Since then, engineers have replaced seals where the hydrogen is pumped into the rocket’s core stage, and where fuel lines must detach promptly at the moment of launch.
During a second wet dress rehearsal on Thursday, the seals performed well with no significant leakage of hydrogen. The rocket was fully fuelled and the rehearsal then proceeded through its countdown sequence, stopping, as planned, just 29 seconds before launch.
This went smoothly enough for officials to green light preparations for a March liftoff.
“We’re now targeting March 6 as our earliest launch attempt,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, during a news briefing on Friday.
March 6 marks the first available date in a five-day launch window during which the moon is in a favourable position for the flight.
The dress rehearsal does not require the presence of the crew, but Dr. Glaze said that several crew members, including commander Reid Wiseman, mission specialist Christina Koch and Col. Hansen were on hand to observe the operation.
Together with pilot Victor Glover, they were scheduled to enter a 14-day quarantine period starting Friday afternoon in order to maintain March 6 as a viable launch date.
“They’re all very excited,” said Dr. Glaze. There is “a lot of anticipation for a potential launch in March.”
The target date comes with the caveat that the mission must still pass a flight readiness review, which Dr. Glaze said would take place at the end of next week.
“It is going to be an extensive and detailed review,” she said. “We are going to go over and comb every aspect of this system.”
Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said one additional milestone that needs to take place before launch is the installation of equipment, including platforms, that allow crews to preform critical maintenance on the rocket without having to roll it off the launch pad.
But it was clear that the mission has been buoyed by Thursday’s success, after earlier uncertainty about whether the leak problem could be managed in a timely way.
“Getting through this wet dress was an important milestone for us,” Ms. Blackwell-Thompson said.
Two technical hitches that did arise on Thursday – a communication system problem on the ground and a voltage anomaly on one of the SLS booster rockets – did not impede the dress rehearsal enough to affect the launch timeline.
John Honeycutt, who chairs the Artemis II mission management team, said the performance of the new seals meant that he did not anticipate any further replacement of parts on that aspect of the rocket ahead of launch.
“I’ve got a pretty high level of confidence in the configuration that we’re in right now,” he said. “It’s out there at the pad. It’s going to be there at the pad until we go fly.”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the planned Artemis II mission will be the first crewed flight to the moon in 52 years. It will be the first in 53 years. The article incorrectly stated that the SLS rocket atop which Artemis II sits is 108 metres tall. It is 98 metres tall.