Excited to share this moment in history with some of the newest members of the office, and and of course Launch window opens at 2:17 ET tomorrow! /n3cy0227AJ Preparation continues for tomorrow’s launch attempt. “We have convinced ourselves without a shadow of a doubt that we have good-quality liquid hydrogen going through the engines,” said John Honeycutt, the rocket’s programme manager. The engines need to match the minus-250 degrees Celsius (-420 degrees Fahrenheit) of the liquid hydrogen fuel at liftoff, otherwise they could be damaged and shut down in flight. The engineers in charge of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket insisted on Thursday evening that all four of the rocket’s main engines were good and that a faulty temperature sensor caused one of them to appear as though it were too warm on Monday. Maybe me, maybe my friends,” Meir told The Associated Press news agency on Friday. “We’re all excited for this to go, but the most important thing is that we go when we’re ready and we get it right, because the next missions will have humans on board. ![]() So is astronaut Jessica Meir, who is on NASA’s shortlist for one of the initial moon crews. NASA administrator Bill Nelson said he is more confident going into Saturday’s launch attempt, given everything engineers learned from the first try. Twelve astronauts walked on the moon during six Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, the only spaceflights yet to place humans on the lunar surface.Īpollo grew out of the US-Soviet space race of the Cold War era, while NASA’s renewed lunar focus is driven more by science and encompasses international partnerships with the space agencies of Europe, Japan and Canada, and with commercial rocket ventures such as SpaceX. If the first two Artemis missions succeed, NASA is aiming to land astronauts back on the moon, including the first woman to set foot on the lunar surface, as early as 2025, though many experts believe that the time frame is likely to slip by a few years. NASA wants to try out the spacecraft before strapping in astronauts on the next planned flight in two years. ![]() Atop the rocket is a crew capsule with three test dummies that will fly around the moon and back over the course of six weeks - NASA’s first such attempt since the Apollo programme 50 years ago.
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