“We are going,” said the signs around the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, promoting the plans of the US space agency to return to the moon.
Unfortunately, it was not to be on Monday.
As the 100,000 or more enthusiasts who thronged the beaches and parks close to the facility packed up their belongings and the 700 accredited media stowed away their gear, while vice-president Kamala Harris headed back to Washington, Nasa’s new mega rocket remained on its launch pad.
Forty minutes from the scheduled launch of the new Artemis space programme, which is slated to bring American astronauts back to the moon and potentially on to Mars, the countdown clock was stopped.
A problem relating to a “bleed” in the No 3 engine on the giant 98m rocket known as the space launch system (SLS) stubbornly remained unfixed.
Nasa engineers tried to troubleshoot the problem for more than an hour but to no avail.
As part of the intended process hydrogen is cycled through the engines to get them to reach the correct operating temperature. Three of the four engines on the SLS were working but a problem remained in the final one.
Nasa had a window of two hours from the original launch time of 8.33am local time in Florida (just after 1.30pm in Ireland) to get the rocket off the ground, but eventually it ran out of time.
The space agency said the flight director had then decided to “scrub” the Artemis 1 mission. It has another potential opportunity to launch the SLS rocket and the new Orion spacecraft, which eventually will take astronauts to the moon and beyond, on Friday. However, that will depend on further tests being carried out by engineers on engine No 3.
Nasa administrator Bill Nelson said the SLS rocket was a “very complicated machine”.
“We don’t launch until it is right”, he said after the mission was postponed.
Former astronaut Chris Hadfield said on Twitter: “Spaceflight is hard! Fix the problem, learn from it, try again.”
Nasa had earlier overcome problems fuelling the new rocket system, which requires the equivalent of about 40 swimming pools of propellant to get it off the ground.
The weather also caused delays at the start of the process for preparing the rocket for launch on Monday. However, the heavy rain and lightning had cleared away by early morning.
Even if the technical issues are resolved, Nasa will need equally clement weather for its next launch window — not a certainty in central Florida at this time of year.
