CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA began fueling its new moon rocket Tuesday for an overnight launch, its third attempt to place an empty capsule around the moon for the first time in 50 years.
Fuel leaks plagued the first two attempts in late summer, and then a pair of hurricanes caused more delays. While engineers never identified the cause of the hydrogen leak, they changed the fueling process to minimize the leak and were confident that all plumbing in the 322-foot (98-meter) rocket would remain tight and intact.
NASA added an hour to the operation to account for the slower fill, vital to reducing pressure in the fuel lines and keeping the seals in place. It seemed to work, with no major leaks reported during the initial stages.
“So far, everything is going very smoothly,” assistant launch manager Jeremy Graeber said about an hour before the feed.
The rocket was ejected with nearly 1 million gallons (3.7 million liters) of supercooled hydrogen and oxygen. After more than four hours, the main stage was fully loaded and fueling was underway in the upper stage.
NASA expected 15,000 to jam the Kennedy Space Center for the launch in the early hours of Wednesday, with thousands more lining the beaches and streets outside the gates. The space agency had two hours to lift off the rocket before it was grounded until Saturday.
The debut of the Space Launch System rocket, known as SLS, had three test dummies but no astronauts inside the crew capsule on top, which NASA hoped would put into lunar orbit.
This first test flight was expected to last three weeks, ending with a crash in the Pacific. NASA’s top priority for the $4.1 billion mission is to verify the capsule’s heat shield on reentry so that four astronauts can land on the next moon in 2024. That will be followed by a two-man landing on the Moon in 2025.
NASA last sent astronauts to the moon in December 1972, ending the Apollo program.
