NASA has had to delay the departure of the mission four times, twice for technical reasons and the other two for meteorological reasons.

The team in charge of the NASA Artemis I mission, which aims to pave the way for lunar exploration, gave the green light to the launch attempt scheduled for this Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after review the latest data.

The two-hour window for the mission’s fifth launch attempt opens at 1:04 a.m. local time on Wednesday, NASA engineers confirmed at a news conference Monday night.

“We reviewed our vehicle configuration from the top of the spacecraft to the bottom of the rocket, including the flight termination system and the batteries that we’ve already reset,” Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for the development of exploration systems.

Likewise, according to those responsible for the mission, a series of problems derived from the passage of Hurricane Nicole through Cape Canaveral last week, which forced the delay of the previous launch attempt, scheduled for this Monday, were definitively solved.

The system’s sealing equipment to abort a launch was loosened by Nicole’s winds battering the space center deck where the huge, expensive SLS rocket sits with the Orion capsule on top.

According to the mission blog, engineers closely examined “the putty in a seam between a warhead in (the spacecraft’s) Orion launch abort system and the crew module adapter” and the potential risks if it were to dislodge during launch. launch.

Engineers determined that “there is a low probability that if additional material is released, it will pose a critical risk to flight,” the US space agency said.

The objective of this unmanned mission is to test the capabilities of the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft before a manned trip scheduled, in principle, for 2024.

The SLS rocket, taller than a 30-story building (322 feet or 98 meters), has cost NASA about $4 billion.

NASA has had to delay the departure of the mission four times, twice for technical reasons and the other two for meteorological reasons.

The overall goal of NASA’s Artemis program is to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century and the Artemis I mission, expected to be the first of many, will lay the groundwork, testing the rocket and spacecraft. and all of its subsystems to ensure they are safe enough for astronauts to fly to the moon and back.

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