As CBS News reports, NASA managers have cleared the agency’s leak-bedeviled Artemis moon rocket for the start of another countdown early Monday, but engineers must resolve questions about hurricane-damaged insulation before the huge booster can be cleared for blastoff on an unpiloted moonshot.
After multiple delays due to hydrogen fuel leaks and other glitches, along with the rocket’s nail-biting brush with Hurricane Nicole last week, NASA managers met Sunday to review launch preparations and agreed to start a 47-hour 10-minute countdown at 1:54 a.m. EST Monday. Launch is planned for 1:04 a.m. Wednesday.
But high winds from Nicole caused a thin strip of caulk-like material known as RTV to delaminate and pull away from the base of the Orion crew capsule’s protective nose cone at the top of the rocket.
The material is used to fill in a slight indentation where the fairing attaches to the capsule, minimizing aerodynamic heating during ascent. The fairing fits over the Orion capsule and is jettisoned once the rocket is out of the dense lower atmosphere.
“It was an area that was about 10 feet in length (on the) windward side where the storm blew through,” said mission manager Mike Sarafin. “It is a very, very thin layer of RTV, it’s about .2 inches or less … in thickness.”
Engineers do not have access for repairs at the pad and must develop “flight rationale,” that is, a justification for flying despite the delaminated RTV, in order to proceed with the launch. Managers want to make sure any additional material that pulls away in flight will not impact and damage downstream components.
The issue is reminiscent of a debate following a foam debris incident in October 2002 that dented an electronics assembly at the base of a shuttle booster. In that case, NASA opted to continue flying while engineers developed a fix. Two flights later, another foam impact caused fatal damage to the shuttle Columbia’s left wing.
Sarafin said the SLS rocket, making an unpiloted test flight, “is a fundamentally different vehicle design.”
“The vehicle in this case is taller, and we do need to take that into account,” he said. “But in terms of hitting critical components … the physics are the same, the analysis is very similar. But where critical components are located (is) just fundamentally different.”
In any case, NASA’s mission management team plans to meet again Monday to review the flight rationale and determine if the countdown can proceed to launch. If any problems do show up, engineers will have two hours to resolve them before the launch window closes.
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