Posted on 07/30/2022 7:43:34 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Artemis 1 team must meet a variety of checkouts and other milestones to make it happen. Indeed, Aug. 29 is just one of three "placeholder" dates in an upcoming Artemis 1 launch window, along with Sept. 2 and Sept. 5...
Artemis 1 will be the first mission in NASA's Artemis program of lunar exploration, which aims to establish a permanent human presence on and around the moon by the late 2020s. It will be the first flight for the powerful but long-delayed SLS and the second for Orion, which aced a quick test flight to Earth orbit back in 2014.
NASA has been gearing up for Artemis 1 for months now. For example, the agency rolled the SLS-Orion stack out to Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida in mid-March, two weeks ahead of a "wet dress rehearsal," a crucial series of tests that included a simulated launch countdown and fueling of the SLS.
Technical issues scuttled that attempt, however, and the Artemis 1 stack was rolled off the pad and back to KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in late April to make some repairs.
Those fixes took about a month. The SLS and Orion were rolled back out to the pad in early June for another crack at the wet dress, which began on June 18. Technicians noticed a hydrogen leak during fueling operations on June 20 but were able to work past it, and mission team members ultimately declared the rehearsal a success.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Cool! As an old time NASA space junkie (and a vendor for some of their software operations), I’m stoked to hear the good news.
Let’s hope the woke folk don’t turn this into a “check off the minority box” deal!
Sure it is....
The whole program seems to be a repeat of what we have already done just to prove diversity. Whatever happens, the brilliance and competence of the Apollo program(Mercury and Gemini(included) will never be matched. I will pray for them that there are still people there led by God. That whole program had God’s protection.
Probably the last thing our government did that was worthwhile, successful and somewhat bipartisan. I’m reading Rocket Men now and the Apollo 8 book-my favorite mission. I even listen to the whole mission on youtube just to take a break form the insane demonic world now in which we live. Simpler times.
Frank Borman and Jim Lovell are still alive -mid 90s. Great men. My Dad’s old boss at Eastern Air Lines was Frank Borman,not the greatest CEO but the right man at the right time for America. Dad met him a few times.
They’ve already loaded the mannequin astronaut for tests during the flight.
NASA’s ‘Moonikin’ mannequin boards Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1 moon mission
https://www.space.com/nasa-moonikin-artemis-1-mannequin-on-orion-capsule
You can bet a whole committee made sure that it’s a gender-neutral moonikin.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Are you familiar with the Apollo in real time website?
It is the 11, 13 and 17 missions all archived mission control chatter pictures and video combined for the entire missions from launch to splashdown.
Bookmark
Those were amazing times. My dad worked for McDonnell, but not on the space capsules, and we followed the missions. One of my early memories is of watching Mercury launches with a friend and drawing pictures of the rockets.
Only a government that prints money can afford this old-school approach which wastefully expends boosters and upper stages.
No government could have marched European civilization across the US continent in the time frame it was done. Only in the name of commerce (mostly) could it happen. No government designed or built the prairie schooners thankfully; imagine the overweight monstrosity a government agency would have come up with even in mid-19th century. It was done by entrepreneurs who had to be competitively sensible.
No government agency will produce self-sustaining off-world human civilizations. It will be done by entrepreneurs who don’t throw away their equipment after one use.
Only one month before the first official delay!
Thanks for the link! I’ve bookmarked the page, will visit and relive the great days of NASA when I have some time.
I’ve read a number of books on NASA in the Golden Age, among then Kranz’ “Failure is not an Option”, Chaikin’s “A Man on The Moon” (basis for HBO Series “From the Earth to the Moon”) and Lovell’s “Lost Moon” (basis for movie “Apollo 13”). Now reading Cox and Murray’s “Apollo”, about how the whole program came about and was done back in the 60s.
This stuff really needs to be required reading for the next generation so they can learn how America used to roll up its sleeves and just do the job before and without “anti-social media”.
Wake up people...
It’s all about the money...
Stop wasting money on moon explorations that lead to nothing, zero, zilch...
A colossal waste of taxpayers’ hard earned money (like almost everything the government does). There isn’t anything on the moon worth the cost of getting there and back. Scientific samples were taken decades ago by the Apollo program. And nothing about the moon has changed since then. So what’s the point of going? Are they going to have a crew black lesbian transgenders and lesbians to counter the white heterosexual males who went on Apollo?
The main visual similarity with Apollo is the shape of the unit the astronats occupy and return to earth in. That was apparently determined by the “rocketless” re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere and with that the need to have a “shield” surface facing down, to protect the astronauts from the heat generated by their more-or-less falling container.
I would have thoght by now we would have advanced to fully powered re-entry to earth’s atmosphere, where a powered vehicle would not descend rapidly but instead would make successively lower orbits until it could finally land.
Maybe when we jetison the heavy fuels we know use for very small nuclear power modules our home-bound astronauts will quit “dropping” back to earth like a stone.
Epic. Mega. Ultra. MAGA.
But no mention how this accomplishes NASA’s number one mission of making Muslims feel good about themselves.
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