So I did the thing again where I clear my morning for a rocket launch that doesn't happen.
NASA tried to get Artemis I off the pad today, second attempt this week after the first one got scrubbed last Monday over an engine bleed temperature reading that never made sense to me no matter how many times the commentators explained it. Today was supposed to be it. Liftoff window opened around 2:17pm Eastern, Orion capsule sitting on top of the Space Launch System at Kennedy's Pad 39B, no crew aboard, just a very expensive test flight meant to loop around the Moon and come back so they can eventually put people on the next one.
I had the NASA stream up in a tab all morning while I was supposed to be doing actual work. Made coffee, ignored some emails, checked back every twenty minutes like it was a football score. Around mid-morning during fueling they hit a hydrogen leak at the quick-disconnect fitting on the tail service mast umbilical, which is a mouthful but basically means the pipe that feeds liquid hydrogen into the core stage wasn't sealing right where it connects to the rocket. They tried warming it up, cooling it back down, tried it again. Nothing. By early afternoon they called it. No launch today either.
I want to be clear I'm not trying to dunk on the engineers here, because I genuinely don't understand loading super-cooled liquid hydrogen into a rocket the size of a apartment building well enough to have an informed opinion on how hard that is. It's apparently very hard. Hydrogen is a famously annoying molecule, tiny enough to sneak through seals that would hold anything else, and this exact same category of leak grounded shuttle launches for decades before SLS ever existed. So in one sense none of this is surprising.
But it's also just kind of embarrassing given the price tag. NASA's own inspector general put the estimated cost of each SLS launch north of four billion dollars, and that's before you get into the roughly twenty years and tens of billions that got this program to the pad at all. Two scrubs in a week on a rocket built mostly from reused and redesigned Space Shuttle parts feels like it should have fewer surprises left in it than this. I get that "uncrewed test flight" means the whole point is finding problems before people are strapped to the thing. I still feel a little bad for whoever has to explain the fourth or fifth delay to a congressional budget committee.
The mission team, Mike Sarafin was the one on camera doing the postmortem, said they're looking at whether they can fix this leak on the pad or if it needs a trip back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would push things out into October at the earliest because of upcoming range safety cert deadlines and a couple of Cape Canaveral rocket launches (there's a SpaceX Falcon 9 crew mission queued up too) that need runway of their own. So this could be a while.
Small aside because I can't help myself: watching a scrub live is a genuinely different experience than reading about one after the fact. There's a specific kind of anticlimax to a countdown clock just quietly holding at T-minus and a launch director's voice going flat as they read out the scrub call. My nine-year-old wandered in around the time the leak got announced, watched for four minutes, and said "so it's not going to space" and walked back out, which is honestly a pretty accurate summary of my whole morning.
I've been half-following the Artemis program on and off for a couple years now, mostly because I like the idea of an American return-to-the-Moon program actually existing again after so long, even if SLS itself is a weird patchwork of shuttle-era hardware dressed up as a new rocket. I want this thing to fly. I just also want it to stop making me clear my calendar for nothing. If they get a fix figured out fast, next window realistically opens up in a few days, but honestly at this point I'm not setting an alarm until I hear they've actually got hydrogen flowing clean all the way through a countdown.
Anyway. Coffee's cold, emails are still unread, and the Moon is still very much still up there waiting.