WASHINGTON (Reuters) – NASA aims to make a second attempt on Saturday, Sept. 3 to launch its new Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket, five days after a pair of technical issues foiled an attempt on Monday, agency officials said on Tuesday.
Plans call for the 32-story-tall SLS rocket to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, sending its Orion capsule on an uncrewed, six-week test flight around the moon and back to Earth.
The long-awaited launch would kick off the U.S. space agency’s moon-to-Mars Artemis program, successor to the Apollo moon project of the 1960s and 1970s.
The first voyage of the SLS-Orion, a mission dubbed Artemis I, aims to put the 5.75-million-pound vehicle through its paces in a rigorous demonstration flight pushing its design limits, before NASA deems it reliable enough to carry astronauts.
NASA’s initial Artemis I launch attempt on Monday ended with a cooling problem with one the rocket’s main-stage engines, forcing a halt to the countdown and a postponement.
At a news briefing on Tuesday, NASA officials said they hoped to have those issues resolved in time for a launch retry on Saturday.
