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The historic Artemis I mission — an uncrewed test flight around the moon that will make use of the most powerful operational rocket in the world — could finally take flight this week, though the team is once again troubleshooting some issues in the lead-up to launch.
The NASA mission team began fueling the rocket Tuesday afternoon at Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of another launch attempt, which comes after weeks of battling various technical problems and setbacks that included the rocket withstanding a Category 1 hurricane. For hours, the fueling appeared to go smoothly, progressing further into the countdown than the two previous launch attempts.
Then, around 9:30 p.m. ET, intermittent leaks began to spring up that were occasionally above the threshold NASA officials hoped to see.
“Teams have advised launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson that there’s not a lot they can do from here if (the leak readings) were to go back up” above the safety threshold, NASA spokesperson Derrol Nail said on the agency’s official livestream for the launch.
Those leaks then forced a halt to fueling the tanks involved, and NASA deployed a “red crew” — a group of personnel specially trained to make repairs while the rocket is loaded with propellant. They tightened some nuts and bolts in the hopes of stopping the leak.
That work finished just before 11 p.m. ET, according to Nail, and the fueling operations resumed.
Then, the Eastern Range, a branch of the military that supports NASA by providing weather forecasting and tracking data after launch, said that one of its radars had gone down, according to Nail. The problem was a faulty ethernet switch that took more than an hour to replace, and testing on that fix is still underway.
The mission is still scheduled to kick off overnight, with liftoff from Kennedy Space Center set to occur anytime within a two-hour launch window that op