NASA will conduct a crucial refueling test of its Artemis 1 moon rocket today (September 21), and you can watch it live.
Technicians are scheduled to begin loading supercold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants onto Artemis 1. space launch system (SLS) megarocket today at 7:15 am EDT (11:15 GMT). Watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly through the space agency.
Artemis 1 will use the SLS to launch an Orion capsule on an uncrewed trip to lunar orbit and back from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The test flight was supposed to take off at the end of last month, but was delayed twice by technical problems, the second of which was a liquid hydrogen leak that occurred during the run-up to a planned liftoff on September 1. 3.
Related: NASA’s Artemis 1 Lunar Mission: Live Updates
Plus: NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission explained in photos
Artemis team 1 replaced two seals At the leak site, a “quick disconnect” linking the SLS’s core stage to a fuel line from its mobile launch tower. Today’s test will help determine if that solution worked. If all goes well, the mission will stay on track to launch on September 1. 27, with a backup opportunity on October 2. two.
It’s unclear how long today’s test will last; in a update on friday (opens in a new tab) (September 16), NASA officials wrote that it “will be concluded when the objectives of the test have been met.”
The fueling test is not the only spaceflight action planned for today. A Russian Soyuz rocket is scheduled to launch cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio into the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9:54 a.m. EDT (1354 GMT). You can also check it out here on Space.com when the time comes.
Artemis 1 is NASA’s first mission sagebrush program, whose goal is to establish a long-term human presence in and around Moon in the late 2020s. If all goes well with Artemis 1, Artemis 2 will launch astronauts on a trip around the moon in 2024, and Artemis 3 will carry people near the lunar south pole a year or two later.
Mike Wall is the author of “out there (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; Illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @migueldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacepointcom (opens in a new tab) or in Facebook (opens in a new tab).
