NASA’s Wet Dress Rehearsal for Artemis 1 Resumes Test on April 12, But in a Modified Format

The wet dress rehearsal for Artemis 1, scheduled for April 12, will not feature the moon rocket's fueling of the upper stage.

As specified in a Space.com report, the crucial "wet dress rehearsal" for the Artemis 1 moon mission of NASA will not cover as much ground as the agency had hoped originally.

Essentially, the wet dress rehearsal is a practice run for Artemis 1, which will utilize an SLS or Space Launch System rocket to send an uncrewed Orian capsule on a roughly month-long journey around the moon. The test undergoes many of the essential prelaunch activities of Artemis 1, which include fueling the SLS.

Test to Resume on April 12

The wet dress started on April 1 and was supposed to wrap up roughly 48 hours later. However, many technical issues paused the proceedings, which were halted to accommodate the launch slated for April 8 of the private Ax-1 mission to the International Space Station from Pad 39A of KSC.

The Artemis 1 team had planned to pick things up again today, although they found a problem with a helium check valve in the mobile launch tower of the Artemis 1.

Essentially, Helium is used to purge fuel lines before propellant loading and unloading, and the valve problem impacted the desired pressure's maintenance of the gas in the RL10 engine of the upper stage of the SLS, explained the officials at NASA in a blog post published last week.

Members of the Artemis 1 team decided to resume the test on April 12, although in a modified format. Specifically, they will not fuel the SLS upper stage anymore, filling only the core stage tanks.

Such a tanking activity will occur on April 14, as will several launch countdowns and other key steps. If everything goes as planned, all things will build toward a simulated launch time of 2:40 pm, after which the team will detank the core stage and carry out other wind-down activities.

Discovering a Faulty Valve

According to SLS chief engineer John Belvins at the Alabama-based Marshall Space Space Flight Center of NASA, he is very confident that they'll have a good test on Thursday with the modified procedure, and he thinks they will learn a lot.

Members of the Artemis 1 project will not get data about upper-stage propellant loading, although they will gather a lot of other information about Orion and SLS. More so, they have already met many of their wet dress objectives because of the aborted initiatives earlier this month, NASA officials said.

Moreover, detecting a faulty is hardly a shock. Artemis 1 will be a pioneering flight for the SLS and just the second for Orion, so some problems are bound to crop up during prelaunch checks, explained the Artemis team members.

Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson from the NASA Exploration Ground Systems program at KSC said learning is part of it. One cannot have a first flight "and not have some learning."

Therefore, she asked, what would one do "when something takes place?" He continued, you look at the data, develop a plan, adapt and let that data lead to the next step.

A related report about NASA's Artemis 1 is shown on Lab 360's YouTube video below:

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