​NASA announced that it wants to try another launch of the SLS rocket on Saturday with the Orion capsule, which is due to end up around the moon. The agency attempted a launch on August 29, but the attempt was aborted due to engine cooling problems. The capsule will not have humans on board, but it should be on future missions in 2024 and 2025.

Now NASA has announced that a new attempt could take place on September 3, in a two-hour window starting at 14:17 local time (21:17 Romanian time).

NASA engineers are confident they can overcome the problems that kept the rocket from launching on Monday, and the launch date will be confirmed after final talks on Thursday.

The Artemis 1 mission will last 42 days, and the Orion capsule should reach a distance of 450,000 km from Earth.

Obviously, even if everything is technically perfect, one important aspect remains: the weather, which is capricious at this time in Florida. Also, the weather is more stable in the morning, while Saturday’s launch “window” is in the afternoon.

The problem, which could not be solved on Monday and which technically could not be checked in April and June, was that one of the four engines could not be cooled to the temperature necessary for normal operation. The culprit seems to have been the nozzle, which is the tube that allows the flow of fluids to occur in each section at the desired pressure or speed. This tube was not working properly and engine 3 was not cooling properly.

This cooling of the engines takes place 4 minutes 40 minutes before launch. The first conclusions are that the problem will not be in the engine itself, but only in the system that supplies it with supercooled fuel.