An engine problem forced NASA to postpone for at least four days the debut launch of the colossal rocketship it hopes will one day fly astronauts back to the moon, more than a half-century after Apollo's last lunar mission
"We don’t launch until it’s right," NASA chief Bill Nelson said in a webcast interview after liftoff was scrubbed. "This is a very complicated machine, a very complicated system, and all those things have to work. And you don’t want to light the candle until it’s ready to go."
Billed as the most powerful, complex rocket in the world, the SLS represents the biggest new vertical launch system the U.S. space agency has built since the Saturn V rocket flown during Apollo, which grew out of the U.S.-Soviet space race of the Cold War era.NASA's next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System , with its Orion crew capsule on top, sits on the pad early in the morning before the unmanned Artemis 1 mission was scrubbed, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S.
NASA officials opted to proceed to final launch preparations and essentially defer the first conditioning run-through until the actual countdown, acknowledging then that such a strategy could end up causing a liftoff delay, as occurred on Monday.
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