A Testing Day

For the two biggest rockets on Earth.  

After yesterday's setback due to the lightning strike, the Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal was back on this morning.  They made it until a bit after 4PM EDT, partially filled the Liquid Oxygen (LOX) tank to prechill it, then began pre-chilling the Liquid Hydrogen tank.  That's when they found a valve that wouldn't work properly on the mobile launch tower.  Today's test was called off by 5PM. From the Artemis blog page:

The Artemis I team has ended today’s attempt at the wet dress rehearsal test at 5 p.m. The countdown ended after partially loading liquid oxygen into the Space Launch System core stage tank. This provided the teams a valuable opportunity for training and to make sure modeled loading procedures were accurate. This was the first time using new systems at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B. The team was able to monitor the Artemis I core stage as it was exposed to cryogenic liquids and gather data that will inform updates to propellant loading procedures.
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During chilldown of the lines in preparation for loading the liquid hydrogen, the teams encountered an issue with a panel on the mobile launcher that controls the core stage vent valve. The purpose of the vent valve is to relieve pressure from the core stage during tanking. Given the time to resolve the issue as teams were nearing the end of their shifts, the launch director made the call to stop the test for the day. A crew will investigate the issue at the pad, and the team will review range availability and the time needed to turn systems around before making a determination on the path forward.

There is a video feed for the test on a channel called KSC Newsroom, but I saw nothing happening on it, just the rocket stack standing there.  It doesn't figure to be a dramatic test to look at, though.  The news updates are on Twitter, and apparently open to all since I'm not a Twitter member.

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Meanwhile, over at Boca Chica, SpaceX wasted no time over the weekend by mounting Booster 7 directly on the Orbital Launch Mount.  They arranged for a road closure today and ran cryogenic tests of the infrastructure all the way to B7 and filling the booster itself. 

This screen capture is after the test had completed but you can see the top section of B7, behind and above the chopsticks, is coated with ice that has been frozen out of the moist Gulf air.  Below the chopsticks, there's a gap in the ice on the left side of the booster, while the rest of it is well coated in ice as well. 

It might be tempting to compare these tests, but SpaceX wasn't doing a WDR.  Both of them were doing necessary tests; NASA's Artemis test is a bit more focused on ground infrastructure like the launcher tower and the pad connections.  Remember, this SLS booster went through a full eight plus minute static firing last March, so barely over a year ago.  Because of that, we know that the SLS booster is capable of doing everything it's supposed to do, making this primarily a test of the ground-based hardware and software.  SpaceX has been testing their equivalent ground-based infrastructure for the last few weeks so problems like Artemis program had today shouldn't be happening at Boca Chica.