NASA’S team leading the Artemis program of lunar missions really wants to get on with their inaugural spaceflight—which was slated for tomorrow morning.
NASA’S team leading the Artemis program of lunar missions really wants to get on with their inaugural spaceflight—which was slated for tomorrow morning. But with a strengthening Hurricane Ian barreling toward the Florida launchpad, it’s time to move the massive Space Launch System rocket to safety.
The space agency will roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to wait for another launch opportunity—but that might mean a delay of several weeks. The team has not yet committed to a date for a new attempt, although a backup window once planned for October 2 now looks all but doomed. “A determination on the return to the pad for launch will be made once the storm has passed and teams conduct post-storm inspections,” Tiffany Fairley, a NASA spokesperson at Kennedy Space Center, wrote in an email to WIRED.
After a series of delays this summer, the Artemis team hoped to finally launch the uncrewed moon rocket from Kennedy in eastern Florida. But worries arose about wind damage to the spacecraft and risks to personnel at the space center. Heading into the weekend, NASA’s weather officers mapped the trajectory of Ian, which at that point was a tropical cyclone that appeared to be gaining strength and heading for landfall in Florida on launch day. The rocket can only tolerate sustained winds up to 74 knots when it’s on the launchpad, said Mike Folger, Exploration Ground Systems program manager at Kennedy, during a press conference on September 23. If those weather forecasts were right, the storm would soon become a hurricane, and winds exceeding that speed would hit Florida’s Space Coast.
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