Nasa says Friday launch for Artemis 'is definitely in play'
An engine-cooling problem forced Nasa on Monday to postpone for at least four days the debut test launch of the colossal new rocket ship it plans to use for future astronaut flights back to the moon, more than 50 years after Apollo's last lunar mission.
Senior Nasa officials declined to set a precise time frame for retrying a launch of the mission, dubbed Artemis I. But at a news briefing hours after the aborted countdown, they said a second launch attempt was still possible as early as Friday, depending on the outcome of further data review.
If engineers can resolve the issue on the launch pad in the next 48 to 72 hours, "Friday is definitely in play," Michael Sarafin, Nasa's Artemis mission manager told reporters.
The mission calls for a six-week, uncrewed test flight of the Orion capsule around the moon and back to Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific.
The planned journey will mark the kickoff of Nasa's highly vaunted moon-to-Mars Artemis program, the successor to the Apollo lunar missions of the 1960s and '70s.
The countdown was halted about 40 minutes before launch time as the 32-story-tall, two-stage Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion crew capsule awaited liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Disappointed spectators who had gathered around the site promptly packed up their chairs, as U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris - who had arrived shortly ahead of the scheduled launch - greeted members of the Nasa team.
