Technicians are scheduled to begin loading supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants aboard Artemis 1 Space launch system (SLS) megarocket today at 7:15 am. EDT (1115 GMT). Watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly through the space agency. Artemis 1 will use SLS to launch an Orion capsule on an uncrewed trip to lunar orbit and back from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The test flight was due to take off late last month, but was delayed twice due to malfunctions, the second of which was liquid hydrogen leak which occurred during a scheduled takeoff on September 3. The Artemis 1 team replaced two seals at the point of the leak, a “quick disconnect” connecting the SLS core stage to a fuel line from its mobile launch tower. Today’s test will help you determine if this fix worked. If all goes well, the mission will remain on track to launch on September 27, with a fallback on October 2. It is unclear how long today’s test will last. in one update on Friday (opens in new tab) (September 16), NASA officials wrote that it “will be completed when the objectives for the test are met.” The refueling test isn’t the only spaceflight action for today. A Russian Soyuz rocket is scheduled to launch cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio to International Space Station from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9:54 AM. EDT (1354 GMT). You can watch it here on Space.com when the time comes. Artemis 1 is NASA’s first mission Artemis program, which aims to create a long-term human presence in and around the moon by the late 2020s. If all goes well with Artemis 1, Artemis 2 will launch astronauts on a trip around the Moon in 2024, and Artemis 3 will land humans near the lunar south pole a year or two later. Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or enabled Facebook (opens in a new tab).
