NASA workers are once again getting the agency's new moon rocket ready for its first test flight, and if all goes well the rocket will blast off during a two-hour launch window that starts at 2:17 p.m. Eastern on Saturday.
"We're going to show up, and we're going to try, and we're going to give it our best," said Mike Sarafin, NASA's Artemis mission manager, during a press briefing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the 32-story-tall rocket, with a crew capsule on top, is waiting on the launch pad.
NASA's first effort to launch this rocket had to be scuttled on Monday morning after a sensor indicated that one of the rocket's four engines didn't seem to be cooling down to the proper temperature of approximately minus-420 degrees Fahrenheit.
After studying the problem and troubleshooting, officials said it's clear the engine was actually fine and a sensor was giving a false temperature reading. "We know we had a bad sensor," said John Honeycutt, program manager for this rocket at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
No astronauts will be on board the Artemis rocket during its long-anticipated first mission, but this flight will be a critical test of how NASA's new vehicle will perform in space and during the fiery return to Earth.
The weather forecast for this launch window seems favorable, with a 60% chance that conditions will be right for liftoff. "Basically, the weather looks good," said weather officer Melody Lovin with Space Launch Delta 45. "I don't expect weather to be a show stopper."
But if weather does prevent the rocket from flying, NASA can try again on Monday.
Once this rocket successfully lifts off, it will send a crew capsule called Orion on a journey to orbit the moon, coming within about 60 miles of the lunar surface. After more than five weeks, it will return home and splash down in the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 11.
The next flight of this rocket will carry people, but it isn't scheduled until 2024. The agency is targeting a 2025 moon landing — although most space watchers expect delays, as this rocket is already years behind its original schedule. Congress had wanted it to fly in 2016, just five years after NASA retired its aging fleet of space shuttles.
Critics say the Artemis program will be too expensive to be sustainable if NASA depends on this rocket and capsule, which come with a hefty price tag. NASA's inspector general has said that each of the first few flights will cost more than $4 billion, and that doesn't include billions of dollars in development costs.
Meanwhile, the private company SpaceX, which currently ferries astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, is developing its own megarocket and space vehicle called Starship. This rocket is expected to have its first flight soon and is designed to be both reusable and inexpensive. NASA has already said it will rely on SpaceX to develop Starship as a lunar lander, to get its astronauts from lunar orbit down to the surface.
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