Home |News| Fuel Leak Ruins Nasas 2nd Shot At Launching Moon Rocket
Fuel leak ruins NASA’s 2nd shot at launching moon rocket
Cape Canaveral: NASA’s new moon rocket sprang another dangerous fuel leak Saturday, forcing launch controllers to call off their second attempt to send a crew capsule into lunar orbit with test dummies. The first attempt earlier in the week was also marred by escaping hydrogen, but those leaks were elsewhere on the 322-foot rocket, the […]
(Members of the media setup as NASAs Artemis I rocket sits on launch pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center on September 03, 2022 in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/AFP)
Cape Canaveral: NASA’s new moon rocket sprang another dangerous fuel leak Saturday, forcing launch controllers to call off their second attempt to send a crew capsule into lunar orbit with test dummies.
The first attempt earlier in the week was also marred by escaping hydrogen, but those leaks were elsewhere on the 322-foot rocket, the most powerful ever built by NASA.
Launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson and her team tried to plug Saturday’s leak the way they did the last time: stopping and restarting the flow of super-cold liquid hydrogen in hopes of removing the gap around a seal in the supply line.
They tried that twice, in fact, and also flushed helium through the line. But the leak persisted. Blackwell-Thompson finally halted the countdown after three to four hours of futile effort.