NASA managed to plug a leak late Tuesday night while fueling the New Moon rocket for a launch in the middle of the night, its third attempt to place an empty capsule around the moon for the first time in 50 years. Hydrogen fuel sprung from a valve on the launch pad — a different location than leaks on previous launch attempts. Two technicians and a safety officer rushed to the blast zone to tighten the valve, with emergency rescue crews on standby. The quick repair fixed the leak, allowing hydrogen to continue flowing into the rocket. But then a Space Force radar tracking site went down due to a bad ethernet switch, leading to yet another fight. The problems pushed the launch into the early hours of Wednesday, as the countdown clocks remained at 10 minutes. “We’re slipping indefinitely into the launch window,” said NASA launch commentator Derrol Nail. “UEL leaks plagued the first two attempts in late summer, then a pair of hurricanes caused further delays. While engineers never identified the cause of the hydrogen leak, they changed the fueling process to minimize the leak and expressed confidence that all hydraulics on the 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, but an intermittent hydrogen leak appeared near the end of the six-hour run. That particular leaky valve is located on the launch platform, not the rocket, officials pointed out, and is necessary to replenish liquid hydrogen as it dissipates from the core stage. The rocket was depleted of nearly 1 million gallons (3.7 million liters) of super-cooled hydrogen and oxygen when the latest leak occurred. 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 US$4.1 billion mission is to verify the capsule’s heat shield on reentry so that four astronauts can stick on for the next lunar eclipse in 2024. That will be followed by a two-person landing on Moon in 2025. NASA last sent astronauts to the moon in December 1972, ending the Apollo program.
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