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Tag Archives: hydrogen
Honda to start producing new hydrogen fuel cell system co-developed with GM
TOKYO, Feb 2 (Reuters) – Japan’s Honda Motor Co (7267.T) said it will start producing a new hydrogen fuel cell system jointly developed with General Motors Co (GM.N) this year and gradually step up sales this decade, in a bid to expand its hydrogen business.
Honda will target annual sales of around 2,000 units of the new system in the middle of this decade, the company said on Thursday, aiming to boost that to 60,000 units per year in 2030.
The Japanese carmaker is seeking to expand the use of its new system not only for its own fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs), but also commercial vehicles such as heavy trucks, as stationary power stations and in construction machinery.
Honda will start production of the hydrogen fuel cell system through its joint venture with GM this year, Honda senior managing executive director Shinji Aoyama told reporters during a company event in Tokyo.
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With the “next-generation” system, the company aims to more than double durability compared with its older fuel cell system and to bring costs down by two-thirds.
“While commercial vehicles are in use all over the world, they’ll likely see electrification just as with passenger cars,” said Tetsuya Hasebe, general manager of Honda’s hydrogen business development division.
That would likely lead to a divergence in trucks using batteries and those running on fuel cells, he added.
Reporting by Daniel Leussink; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Jamie Freed
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
World’s Largest Hydrogen Tank Will Make It Easier for NASA to Launch SLS Megarocket
Preparations for the crewed Artemis 2 trip to the Moon are in full swing, with NASA rolling-out various fixes, upgrades, and new technologies to support the mission, which could happen as soon as 2024. Among the more exciting developments are a gigantic new hydrogen fuel tank and an updated escape system that harkens back to the Space Shuttle era.
Artemis 2, the sequel to the recently concluded Artemis 1 mission, is launching no earlier than late 2024, but NASA, in an effort to maintain this timeline, is already in go mode. A key difference between the two missions is that astronauts will take part in Artemis 2, requiring some important add-ons and adjustments that weren’t needed for the uncrewed Artemis 1. To that end, teams with Exploration Ground Systems have been hard at work at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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A big frustration of Artemis 1 was getting NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket off the ground for the very first time. Ongoing technical problems and pesky hydrogen leaks required NASA to perform multiple launch attempts, with the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) megarocket finally taking flight on November 16, 2022, on the third attempt. And that doesn’t include the four wet dress rehearsals (or five, should we choose to include the cryogenic tanking test done on September 21). As a further complication, mission planners had to squeeze the launch attempts within a flight schedule dictated by celestial happenings, namely the position of Earth relative to the Moon and Sun.
Easy access to liquid hydrogen—the propellant that powers SLS’s four-engine core stage and single-engine Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS)—would make it considerably easier for the Exploration Ground Systems team to perform back-to-back launch attempts in the likely event of scrubs. I say likely because liquid hydrogen, or LH2, is notoriously difficult to contain.
The new 1.4-million-gallon liquid hydrogen tank, located within Launch Complex 39B, will serve to reduce the time between multiple launch attempts, NASA explained in a statement. Jeremy Parsons, deputy manager of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems, told reporters late last year that the new hydrogen sphere “will allow us to get more back-to-back launch attempts, which is a huge capability when we’ve got smaller [launch] windows.” Once in operation, it’ll be the largest liquid hydrogen tank in the world, according to the Cryogenic Society of America.
The Exploration Ground Systems program currently has an existing liquid hydrogen tank at launch pad 39B that can hold 850,000 gallons. This tank was constructed during the Apollo missions and was used during the Shuttle era. For Artemis 2 and beyond, “both liquid hydrogen tanks will be in use,” a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo today.
The new liquid hydrogen tank will have a capacity of 1.4 million gallons, but with a usable space closer to 1.25 million gallons, the spokesperson clarified. The SLS core stage and ICPS require more than 537,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen. Filled with 1.25 million gallons of the super-chilled stuff, the new tank will store more than twice the amount of liquid hydrogen required for a single launch, and with some important room to spare, given that a portion boils off on the launch pad. Combined, the two hydrogen tanks will provide a liquid hydrogen storage capacity of 2.1 million gallons. Construction of the new tank began in 2018.
When preparing for an SLS launch, ground teams flow liquid hydrogen from a storage tank to the base of the Mobile Launcher using transfer lines. From there, the service mast umbilical transfers the propellant into the core stage and ICPS tanks. Once the new tank is complete, ground teams will conduct validations tests to “make sure we’re getting the right pressures, flow rates, no issues with manifolding, and things along those lines,” Parsons said.
An emergency egress system terminus area is also under construction at Launch Complex 39B. In the event of an emergency during launch countdown, astronauts can use this system to safely exit the launch pad area. The system, which wasn’t needed for Artemis 1, will be similar to the one used during the Shuttle program, in which astronauts sat in baskets held by cables. It’s kinda like zip lining, but without the fun.
The upgraded system “will enable astronauts to exit Orion at the Crew Access Arm white room through the mobile launcher tower down to the emergency transportation vehicles on the ground and onward to a safe haven,” according to NASA. The new emergency egress system will feature a larger capacity and various upgrades to meet the demands of Artemis 2 and the upcoming Block 1B SLS rocket required for Artemis 4 and future Moon missions.
For Crawler Transporter 2, teams plan to replace the individual shoes, or tread plates, on its two large tracks, in addition to adding new steering cylinders and doing corrosion control work. Ground teams are also in the midst of repairing damage incurred by the Mobile Launcher during the inaugural launch of SLS. This includes busted pipes, fried cameras, and blast doors on the tower’s elevator that got, uh, blasted.
Preparations are also underway for the Artemis 2 Orion crew module, which will actually hold a crew during Artemis 2. Similar to Artemis 1, Orion will venture past the Moon and return home to Earth without any activities planned on the lunar surface. That feat—the first Moonwalk since the Apollo 17 mission of 1972—won’t happen until Artemis 3, currently slated for launch in either 2025 or 2026.
The Artemis 2 Orion capsule will feature hardware not included in Artemis 1, “including normal and emergency communication components, display units, hand controllers, full fidelity side and docking hatches, environmental control and life support subsystems for nitrogen, oxygen, water, and air, as well as waste management, and fire detection and suppression,” according to the space agency. Orion’s heat shield will be added before summertime. As for the rocket’s critically important launch abort system, it’s 90% complete in terms of assembly, integration, and testing.
It seems a bit early to be talking about Artemis 2, but late 2024 isn’t that far off, especially as far as NASA timelines are concerned. The space agency isn’t known for hitting deadlines, so this is all very necessary stuff. NASA also benefited from the tremendous success of Artemis 1, allowing it to set its sights firmly on the next mission.
More: 7 Things We Learned From NASA’s Wildly Successful Artemis 1 Mission
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A Chinese man rode a hydrogen ballon to pick pine nuts. He ended up drifting 300km
Hong Kong
CNN
—
A man who lost control of his hydrogen balloon while harvesting pine nuts in China has been found and rescued – after landing in a forest two days later and more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) away.
The man, surnamed Hu, had been working alongside a colleague on Sunday in Hailin county, Heilongjiang province, when they lost control of the balloon. While his colleague jumped to safety, Hu missed his chance and drifted away.
He was not found until 9 a.m. local time on Tuesday when – after tracing his mobile phone signal – a rescue team made up of more than 500 people from the local police and fire departments spotted his balloon stuck in a tree, state-run Global Times reported on Wednesday.
“I almost gave up,” Hu told the Chinese state-run broadcaster CCTV. “Thanks to the rescuers, otherwise, I wouldn’t be alive.”
Hu told interviewers he had been cold and hungry during the ordeal. However, he was largely unharmed, suffering what were described as only minor injuries to his waist.
The use of hydrogen or helium balloons to harvest pine nuts has become more common in China in recent years and there are occasionally reports of pickers being swept away – though not usually as far as Hu.
In 2019, two men picking pine cones in China’s Changbai mountains reportedly lost control of their balloon and drifted 10 kilometers (6 miles) – before landing safely and being arrested for breaking aviation regulations. In another case, in 2017, a nut picker went missing near the North Korea border after his balloon became untethered.
Even without out-of-control balloons, harvesting pine nuts in China can be a dangerous business. Traditionally, pickers wearing spiked shoes climb the trees – which can grow to 20 meters (about 65 feet) – and falls can be fatal.
NASA Opts to Fix SLS Megarocket Hydrogen Leak on Launch Pad
NASA is preparing to replace a faulty seal linked to a hydrogen leak that resulted in the second scrubbed launch attempt of SLS on Saturday. The repairs will happen at the launch pad, which is ideal from a testing perspective, but NASA still needs to cart the jumbo rocket back to the assembly building to meet safety requirements.
Technicians will replace a seal on the quick disconnect, an interface that joins the liquid hydrogen fuel line on the mobile launcher to the Space Launch System core stage, according to a brief NASA statement. The teams will also check plate coverings on other umbilicals to rule out hydrogen leaks at those locations. “With seven main umbilical lines, each line may have multiple connection points,” NASA explained.
NASA is attempting an uncrewed mission to the Moon and back, in preparation for a human lunar landing later this decade. But during the early stages of the launch attempt on September 3, an inadvertent command briefly raised the pressure within the system, possibly damaging some components. An unmanageable hydrogen leak resulted in the scrub—the second in a week. The earlier scrub, on Monday, August 29, was also marred by a hydrogen leak, though engineers were able to resolve it. Ultimately, it was a faulty sensor that doomed the first launch attempt.
The unflown SLS rocket remains in a safe configuration, standing tall on Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA is seeking to launch the Artemis 1 mission, in which the rocket will send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a journey around the Moon and back. The first launch period, which ran from August 23 to September 6, has ended, forcing a pause in the action. The space agency must now prepare the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket for the third Artemis 1 launch attempt, the date of which has not yet been announced.
Technicians are planning to set up a temporary enclosure around the base of the rocket to protect the hardware from the Florida weather. A benefit of working directly on the pad is that engineers will be able to test the fix under cryogenic conditions. During launch preparations, liquid hydrogen gets pumped through the system at ultra-cold temperatures reaching -423 degrees Fahrenheit (-253 degrees Celsius). This, plus the added high pressure, has the effect of contracting and warping components, which can lead to unwanted and dangerous leaks, particularly around seals.
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As a propellant, hydrogen is efficient but notoriously difficult to reign in. Hydrogen leaks were an all-too-frequent source of scrubs during the Space Shuttle era, and now SLS, which is likewise powered by a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen mixture, appears to be suffering from the same technical hardship.
Engineers mulled returning SLS to the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for the required repairs but opted instead to work on the pad. The VAB would’ve presented a more controlled environment to work in, but without the ability to replicate the desired cryogenic conditions for testing (tests inside the VAB have to be run at ambient temperatures). “Performing the work at the pad also allows teams to gather as much data as possible to understand the cause of the issue,” NASA added.
SLS will likely have to return to the VAB, fix or no fix. The Eastern Range, a branch of the U.S. Space Force, requires periodic certification of the rocket’s flight termination system. NASA already received a waiver that extended certification from 20 to 25 days, but it’s not clear if the space agency will request a second waiver, which would be irregular. The Eastern Range oversees launches from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and works to ensure the public’s safety.
At a press briefing on Saturday, Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, said “it’s not our decision—it’s the Range’s decision.” He added that a waiver from the Range could keep the rocket on the pad, “but that’s not likely.” So, under the Eastern Range restrictions, and until we hear otherwise from NASA about a second waiver, the rocket must return to the VAB prior to the next launch period.
A third launch attempt in late September or early October remains a distant possibility. The next period opens on September 19 and closes on October 4, with no opportunities to launch on September 29 and 30. For this to work, however, NASA would have to complete its latest fix, run tests, cart SLS back to the VAB for recertification (which involves a very short confidence test), and then cart it back to the launch pad. It’s possible, but ground teams will have to haul ass to make this happen.
Failing this, the third launch period opens on October 17 and closes on October 31, with launch exclusions on October 24, 25, 26, and 28. Two other periods, one in November and one in December, exist within the current calendar year.
There’s still plenty of time for SLS to launch in 2022, but it all depends on how quickly engineers can get a handle on this complex system. SLS is the most powerful rocket that NASA has ever built and is a key component of the space agency’s Artemis program, which seeks a sustained and prolonged human presence at and around the Moon.
More: What to Know About Lunar Gateway, NASA’s Future Moon-Orbiting Space Station.
Why Hydrogen Leaks Continue to Be a Major Headache for NASA Launches
NASA’s Space Launch System is powered by a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Together, these elements provide for a compact and extremely powerful rocket propellant, but these same attributes are also what make this fuel a liability.
The second launch attempt of SLS had to be called off on Saturday, September 3, after engineers failed to resolve a hydrogen leak in a quick disconnect—an 8-inch inlet that connects the liquid hydrogen fuel line to the rocket’s core stage. As a result of the setback, SLS probably won’t launch until October at the earliest. The Artemis 1 mission, in which an uncrewed Orion spacecraft will journey to the Moon and back, will have to wait.
Ground teams were able to fix a hydrogen leak during the first failed launch attempt on Monday, August 29, but the launch was eventually called off after a faulty sensor erroneously indicated that an engine hadn’t reached the required ultra-cold temperature. The leak on Saturday proved to be much more difficult to contain, with engineers attempting three fixes, none of which worked. “This was not a manageable leak,” Mike Sarafin, Artemis mission manager, told reporters after the scrub.
NASA is still evaluating its next steps, but the rocket must return to the Vehicle Assembly Building to undergo a mandated safety check related to its flight termination system. The rocket may require some hardware fixes on account of an inadvertent command that briefly raised the pressure within the system. The unintended over-pressurization may have contributed to the leaky seal, and it’s something engineers are currently evaluating as a possibility.
Inheriting the hydrogen problem
Hydrogen leaks are nothing new for NASA. Scrubs of Space Shuttle launches happened with upsetting regularity and were often the result of hydrogen leaks. One of the more infamous episodes was “the summer of hydrogen,” when ground teams spent more than six months trying to locate an elusive hydrogen leak that grounded the Shuttle fleet in 1990. SLS is heavily modeled after the Space Shuttle, including the use of liquid hydrogen propellant, so hydrogen-related scrubs could certainly have been predicted. But SLS is what it is, and NASA has little choice but to manage this limitation of its mega Moon rocket.
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Jordan Bimm, a space historian at the University of Chicago, says NASA continues to use liquid hydrogen for political rather than technical reasons.
“Since the creation of NASA in 1958, the agency has used contractors located around the U.S. as a way to maintain broad political support and funding for space exploration in Congress,” Bimm told me. “The first system to use liquid hydrogen was the Centaur rocket developed in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2010, the U.S. Congress, in their authorization act funding NASA, mandated that the Agency use existing technologies from the Shuttle in their next-generation launch system.” To which he added: “This was a political decision meant to maintain contractor jobs in key political districts and from that funding and support in Congress for NASA.”
This development meant that the RS-25 engine from the retiring Space Shuttle, along with its reliance on a liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen mixture, would have to be carried over to SLS. In total, NASA managed to collect 16 engines from the retired Shuttles, of which four are currently affixed to the SLS rocket standing on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This situation, said Bimm, is a reminder of the catchphrase from the 1983 film The Right Stuff: “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” NASA, he said, “must often prioritize shoring-up political support from Congress to maintain its exploration program.” The ongoing use of RS-25 engines “is another example of how something as mundane as fuel choice can be political and how often the most straightforward and desirable solutions are not politically viable for a large national agency created in the Cold War era of ‘Big Science’,” said Bimm.
Instead of opting for propellants like methane or kerosene, NASA chose to use a mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to power its heavy-lift rocket. By comparison, SpaceX’s upcoming Starship uses liquid methane, with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. “With their sights set on Mars, SpaceX selected liquid methane in the hopes of being able to extract this element [when] on Mars as a form of cost-saving resource utilization,” Bimm explained. The U.S. space agency, perpetually cash-strapped and having to please politicians, was working under a different set of principles when designing SLS.
“Based on current information and analysis, the [proposed SLS design] represents the lowest near-term costs, soonest available, and the least overall risk path to the development of the next, domestic heavy lift launch vehicle,” wrote NASA in a 2011 preliminary project report. “Selecting this SLS architecture would mean that a new liquid engine in the near term would not need to be developed, thus shortening the time to first flight as well as likely minimizing the overall…cost of the SLS.”
The irony is that SLS, which was supposed to fly in 2017, has yet to launch, and its total development costs, including the Orion crew capsule, have now exceeded $50 billion. That excludes the estimated $4.1 billion cost pegged for each launch of SLS. And by inheriting Space Shuttle components, NASA has also inherited the hydrogen problem.
A beneficial but pesky molecule
Hydrogen is extremely useful as a rocket fuel. It’s readily available, clean, lightweight, and, when combined with liquid oxygen, burns with extreme intensity. “In combination with an oxidizer such as liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen yields the highest specific impulse, or efficiency in relation to the amount of propellant consumed, of any known rocket propellant,” according to NASA. When chilled to -423 degrees Fahrenheit (-253 degrees Celsius), hydrogen can be crammed into a rocket, offering a tremendous amount of fuel for the buck. “The advantages of liquid hydrogen as a fuel is its efficiency at storing the energy you want to release to propel the rocket, as well as its low weight, which is always a consideration in spaceflight,” said Bimm.
NASA’s Apollo-era Saturn rocket second stage used liquid hydrogen, as did the Shuttle’s three main engines. Hydrogen is commonly used for second stages (Europe’s heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket is a good example), and as the liquid fuel needed for maneuvering spacecraft in orbit. Rockets that currently use liquid hydrogen include Atlas’s Centaur and Boeing’s Delta III and IV, while Blue Origin’s BE-3 and BE-7 engines also rely on hydrogen.
“The disadvantages of hydrogen are that it is very difficult to move around and control due to the small molecular size of hydrogen which leads to leaks and the need to keep it in a liquid state which requires cooling to extremely low temperatures,” said Bimm. What’s more, hydrogen is highly volatile when in a liquid state, and it can burn in large quantities. As the lightest known element, it’s also very leaky. NASA explains the many challenges of using liquid hydrogen as fuel:
To keep it from evaporating or boiling off, rockets fuelled with liquid hydrogen must be carefully insulated from all sources of heat, such as rocket engine exhaust and air friction during flight through the atmosphere. Once the vehicle reaches space, it must be protected from the radiant heat of the Sun. When liquid hydrogen absorbs heat, it expands rapidly; thus, venting is necessary to prevent the tank from exploding. Metals exposed to the extreme cold of liquid hydrogen become brittle. Moreover, liquid hydrogen can leak through minute pores in welded seams.
Despite these challenges, NASA opted for liquid hydrogen when designing SLS, and now it’s paying the price.
New rocket, same old problems
When tanking SLS, the sudden influx of cryogenic hydrogen causes significant changes to the rocket’s physical structure. The 130-foot-tall (40-meter-tall) hydrogen tank shrinks about 6 inches (152 mm) in length and about 1 inch (25.4 mm) in diameter when filled with the ultra-cold liquid, according to NASA. Components attached to the tank, such as ducts, vent lines, and brackets, must compensate for this sudden contraction. To achieve this, NASA uses connectors with accordion-like bellows, slotted joints, telescoping sections, and ball joint hinges.
But hydrogen—the smallest molecule in the universe—often finds its way through even the tiniest of openings. The fuel lines are particularly problematic, as they cannot be hard-bolted to the rocket. As their name suggests, the quick disconnects, while providing a tight seal, are designed to break free from the rocket during launch. This seal must prevent leakage under high pressures and ultra-cold temperatures, but it also needs to let go as the rocket takes flight. On Saturday, a leak in the vicinity of the quick disconnect reached concentrations well beyond the 4% constraint, exceeding NASA’s flammability limits. Unable to resolve the leak, NASA called the scrub.
That NASA has yet to fully fuel the first and second stages and get deep into the countdown is a genuine cause for concern. The space agency has dealt with hydrogen leaks before, so hopefully its engineers will once again devise a solution to move the project forward.
Still, it’s a frustrating start to the Artemis era. NASA needs SLS as it seeks a permanent and sustainable return to the lunar environment, and as it eyes a future human mission to Mars. NASA is going to have to make SLS work, and it might have to do so one aggravating scrub at a time.
Hydrogen leak forces multi-week delay for Artemis moon rocket
NASA’s star-crossed Space Launch System moon rocket was grounded for the second time in five days Saturday, this time by a large hydrogen leak in a fuel line quick-disconnect fitting that will delay the $4.1 billion booster’s maiden flight by several weeks, likely into October.
The latest delay was a frustrating disappointment to the Kennedy Space Center work force, invited guests and thousands of area residents and tourists who lined area roads and beaches to watch NASA’s most powerful rocket blast off, raising the curtain on the agency’s Artemis moon program.
But faced with a large hydrogen leak and without enough time to make repairs before the current lunar launch period ends Tuesday, NASA managers had little choice but to order a delay for the Artemis 1 test flight.
NASA
Engineers are assessing two options to fix the latest problem: replace components in the suspect fitting at the launch pad and carry out a mini fueling test with liquid hydrogen to verify leak-free performance. Or roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building and carry out repairs there.
While the VAB would provide shelter from the weather and would not require assembly of an environment enclosure to protect sensitive components during the repair work, engineers would not be able to test the fitting with cryogenic hydrogen. And that’s when leaks are most likely to show up.
Either option means a multi-week launch delay. The next lunar launch period starts Sept. 19 and runs through Oct. 4. But NASA is scheduled to launch a fresh crew to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX capsule on Oct. 3 and the agency wants to avoid a conflict.
That means the SLS launch likely will slip into the next launch period, which opens Oct. 17 and runs through Halloween, unless a solution can be found to speed up the repair work.
“This is an incredibly hard business,” said Artemis 1 mission manager Mike Sarafin. “Our focus is on understanding the problem. … We’ll follow up next week when we have those options flushed out further.”
During Saturday’s countdown, engineers made three attempts to properly “seat” a suspect seal in the 8-inch quick-disconnect fitting, but none of them worked. After a “no-go” recommendation from the engineers working the problem, Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson called off the countdown at 11:17 a.m. EDT.
“We’ll go when it’s ready,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “We don’t go until then, especially now, on a test flight.”
It’s not yet clear what caused the leak, but Sarafin said a valve was inadvertently cycled during the initial moments of the fuel loading operation, briefly over pressurizing the lines and the quick-disconnect fitting.
“There was an inadvertent pressurization of the hydrogen transfer line that exceeded what we had planned, which was about 20 pounds per square inch,” he said. “It got up to about 60 pounds per square inch. The flight hardware itself, we know it is fine, we did not exceed the maximum design pressure.
“But there’s a chance that the soft goods, or the seal in the eight-inch quick disconnect saw some effects from that, but it’s too early to tell. … What we do know is that we saw a large leak.”
NASA
The goal of the Artemis 1 mission is to boost an unpiloted Orion capsule into a distant orbit around the moon, testing the spacecraft in the deep space environment before returning it to Earth for a high-speed, high-temperature re-entry.
If the initial uncrewed test flight goes well, NASA plans to launch four astronauts on an around-the-moon shakedown flight — Artemis 2 — in 2024 and to land the first woman and next man near the moon’s south pole the 2025-26 timeframe. But all of that hinges on a successful Artemis 1 test flight.
The long-awaited mission must take off during specific launch periods based on the constantly changing positions of the Earth and moon, the desired lunar orbit for the Orion spacecraft and the power of the SLS rocket to put it on the proper trajectory.
Complicating the planning, flight planners want to avoid putting the solar-powered spacecraft in the moon’s shadow for extended periods and they want to ensure a daylight splashdown.
The current launch window closes Tuesday, the same day certification of batteries in the rocket’s self-destruct system expires. That alone would have required roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for already-planned servicing because the batteries cannot be accessed at the launch pad.
NASA attempted to launch the SLS rocket on its maiden flight Monday after four countdown rehearsals and fueling tests, all of which ran into multiple technical snags, including hydrogen leaks in different systems.
During Monday’s launch attempt, a faulty temperature sensor led to uncertainty as to whether the SLS rocket’s four RS-25 first stage engines were receiving the proper pre-launch cooling.
In addition, the same fitting that leaked Saturday also leaked during the Monday launch try, but concentrations were much lower and engineers managed get the hydrogen tank filed before the enging cooling issue cropped up.
As it turned out, the engines were, in fact, being properly chilled and a faulty temperature sensor was responsible for misleading engineers.
Years after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen
Enlarge / NASA’s Space Launch System rocket at LC-39B on September 1st, 2022.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—America’s space agency on Saturday sought to launch a rocket largely cobbled together from the space shuttle, which itself was designed and built more than four decades ago.
As the space shuttle often was delayed due to technical problems, it therefore comes as scant surprise that the debut launch of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket scrubbed a few hours before its launch window opened. The showstopper was an 8-inch diameter line carrying liquid hydrogen into the rocket. It sprung a persistent leak at the inlet, known as a quick-disconnect, leading on board the vehicle.
Valiantly, the launch team at Kennedy Space Center tried three different times to staunch the leak, all to no avail. Finally at 11:17 am ET, hours behind on their timeline to fuel the rocket, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson called a halt.
What comes next depends on what engineers and technicians find on Monday when they inspect the vehicle at the launch pad. If the launch team decides it can replace the quick-disconnect hardware at the pad, it may be an option to perform a partial fueling test to determine the integrity of the fix. This may allow NASA to keep the vehicle on the pad ahead of the next launch. Alternatively, the engineers may decide the repairs are best performed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, and roll the rocket back inside.
Due to the orbital dynamics of the Artemis I mission to fly an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to the Moon, NASA will next have an opportunity to launch from September 19 to October 4. However, making that window would necessitate fixing the rocket at the pad, and then getting a waiver from the US Space Force, which operates the launch range along the Florida coast.
At issue is the flight termination system, which is powered independently of the rocket, with batteries rated for 25 days. NASA would need to extend that battery rating to about 40 days. The space agency is expected to have those discussions with range officials soon.
If the rocket is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would be necessary service the flight termination system or perform more than cursory work at the launch pad, NASA has another Artemis I launch opportunity from October 17 to October 31.
A tiny, tiny element
The space shuttle was an extremely complex vehicle, mingling the use of solid-rocket boosters—which are something akin to very, very powerful firecrackers—along with exquisitely built main engines powered by the combustion of liquid hydrogen propellant and liquid oxygen to serve as an oxidizer.
Over its lifetime, due to this complexity, the shuttle on average scrubbed nearly once every launch attempt. Some shuttle flights scrubbed as many as five times before finally lifting off. For launch controllers, it never really got a whole lot easier to manage the space shuttle’s complex fueling process, and hydrogen was frequently a culprit.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it is also the lightest. It takes 600 sextillion hydrogen atoms to reach the mass of a single gram. Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.
To keep a rocket’s fuel tanks topped off, propellant lines leading from ground-based systems must remain attached to the booster until the very moment of launch. In the final second, the “quick-disconnects” at the end of these lines break away from the rocket. The difficulty is that, in order to be fail-safes in disconnecting from the rocket, this equipment cannot be bolted together tightly enough to entirely preclude the passage of hydrogen atoms—it is extremely difficult to seal these connections under high pressure, and low temperatures.
NASA, therefore, has a tolerance for a small amount of hydrogen leakage. Anything above a 4 percent concentration of hydrogen in the purge area near the quick disconnect, however, is considered a flammability hazard. “We were seeing in excess of that by two or three times that,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis I Mission Manager. “It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be able to work our way through it. Every time we saw a leak, it pretty quickly exceeded our flammability limits.”
Twice, launch controllers stopped the flow of hydrogen into the vehicle, in hopes that the quick-disconnect would warm a little bit. They hoped that, when they restarted slowly flowing cryogenic hydrogen on board the rocket, the quick-disconnect would find a tighter fit with the booster. It did not. Another time they tried applying a significant amount of pressure to re-seat the quick disconnect.
NASA officials are still assessing the cause of the leak, but they believe it may have been due to an errant valve being opened. This occurred during the process of chilling down the rocket prior to loading liquid hydrogen propellant. Amid a sequence of about a dozen commands being sent to the rocket, a command was sent to a wrong valve to open. This was rectified within 3 or 4 seconds, Sarafin said. However, during this time, the hydrogen line that would develop a problematic quick-disconnect was briefly over-pressurized.
Deferring to the experts
So why does NASA use liquid hydrogen as a fuel for its rockets, if it is so difficult to work with, and there are easier to handle alternatives such as methane or kerosene? One reason is that hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, meaning that it provides better “gas mileage” when used in rocket engines. However, the real answer is that Congress mandated that NASA continue to use space shuttle main engines as part of the SLS rocket program.
In 2010, when Congress wrote the authorization bill for NASA that led to creation of the Space Launch System, it directed the agency to “utilize existing contracts, investments, workforce, industrial base, and capabilities from the Space Shuttle and Orion and Ares 1 projects, including … existing United States propulsion systems, including liquid fuel engines, external tank or tank related capability, and solid rocket motor engines.”
During a news conference on Saturday, Ars asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson whether it was the right decision for NASA to continue working with hydrogen after the agency’s experience with the space shuttle. In 2010, Nelson was a US Senator from Florida, and ringleader of the space authorization bill alongside US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas. “We deferred to the experts,” Nelson said.
By this Nelson meant that the Senate worked alongside some officials at NASA, and within industry, to design the SLS rocket. These industry officials, who would continue to win lucrative contracts from NASA work their work on shuttle-related hardware, were only too happy to support the new rocket design.
Among the idea’s opponents was Lori Garver, who served as NASA’s deputy administrator at the time. She said the decision to use space shuttle components for the agency’s next generation rocket seemed like a terrible idea, given the challenges of working with hydrogen demonstrated over the previous three decades.
“They took finicky, expensive programs that couldn’t fly very often, stacked them together differently, and said now, all of a sudden, it’s going to be cheap and easy,” she said. “Yeah, we’ve flown them before, but they’ve proven to be problematic and challenging. This is one of the things that boggled my mind. What about it was going to change? I attribute it to this sort of group think, the contractors and the self-licking ice cream cone.”
Now, NASA faces the challenge of managing this finicky hardware through more inspections and tests after so many already. The rocket’s core stage, manufactured by Boeing, was shipped from its factory in Louisiana more than two and a half years ago. It underwent nearly a year of testing in Mississippi before arriving at Kennedy Space Center in April 2021. Since then, NASA and its contractors have been assembling the complete rocket and testing it on the launch pad.
Effectively, Saturday’s “launch” attempt was the sixth time NASA has tried to completely fuel the first and second stages of the rocket, and then get deep into the countdown. To date, it has not succeeded with any of these fueling tests, known as wet dress rehearsals. On Saturday, the core stage’s massive liquid hydrogen tank, with a capacity of more than 500,000 gallons, was only 11 percent full when the scrub was called.
Perhaps the seventh time will be a charm.
Canada, Germany aim to start hydrogen shipments in 2025
Hydrogen is seen as a component of Europe’s plan to reduce its reliance on Russian fossil fuels, particularly in light of the war in Ukraine and recent reductions in the supply of Russian natural gas to Germany and other countries.
Scholz said Canada is Germany’s partner of choice as the country moves away from relying on Russia to supply energy.
“Our need might be even higher under the new circumstances,” Scholz said.
Natural gas prices have surged as Russia has reduced or cut off natural gas flows to a dozen European Union countries, fueling inflation and raising the risk that Europe could plunge into recession. Germans have been urged to cut gas use now so the country will have enough for the winter ahead.
The Canadian government earlier Tuesday signed separate agreements with Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz that will see the two German auto manufacturers secure access to Canadian raw materials for batteries in electric vehicles. The agreements include Canadian cobalt, graphite, nickel and lithium.
The ‘Cosmic Dawn’ of Our Universe Ended Far Later Than We Thought
For tens of millions of years, our newborn Universe was shrouded in hydrogen. Bit by bit, this vast mist was torn apart by the light of the very first stars in a dawn that defined the shape of the emerging cosmos.
Having a timeline for this colossal shift would go a long way in helping us understand the Universe’s evolution, yet so far our best attempts have been fuzzy estimates based on low-quality data.
An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany used the light from dozens of distant objects called quasars to strip away uncertainties, determining the last major wisps of hydrogen ‘fog’ burned away far later than we first thought, more than a billion years after the Big Bang.
The first 380,000 years were a static hiss of subatomic particles congealing out of the cooling vacuum of expanding space-time.
Once the temperature dropped, hydrogen atoms formed – simple structures consisting of solitary protons teaming up with single electrons.
Soon the entire Universe was filled with uncharged atoms, a sea of them bobbing back and forth in the infinite darkness.
Where crowds of the neutral hydrogen atoms collected under the unpredictable nudge of quantum laws, gravity took over, pulling more and more gas into balls where nuclear fusion could erupt.
This first sun-rise – the breaking of cosmic dawn – bathed the surrounding hydrogen fog in radiation, driving their electrons from their protons and turning the atoms back into the ions they once were.
Just how long this dawn took, from the first light of those early stars to the reionization of the last remaining pockets of primordial hydrogen, has never been clear.
Studies conducted more than 50 years ago made use of the way light from violently active galactic cores (called quasars) was absorbed by interceding gas floating about in the nearby intergalactic medium. Find a series of quasars stretching into the distance, you can effectively see a timeline of neutral hydrogen gas being ionized.
Knowing the theory is one thing. In practical terms, it’s hard to interpret a precise timeline from a handful of quasars. Not only is their light distorted by the expansion of the Universe, but it also passes through pockets of neutral hydrogen formed well after the cosmic dawn.
To get a better sense of this stutter of ionized hydrogen across the sky, researchers supersized their sample, tripling the previous number of high-quality spectral data by analyzing the light from a total of 67 quasars.
The goal was to better understand the impact of these fresher pockets of hydrogen atoms, allowing the researchers to better identify more distant bursts of ionization.
According to their own figures, the last dregs of original hydrogen fell to the rays of first-generation starlight around 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang.
“Until a few years ago, the prevailing wisdom was that reionization completed almost 200 million years earlier,” says astronomer Frederick Davies from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
“Here we now have the strongest evidence yet that the process ended much later, during a cosmic epoch more readily observable by current generation observational facilities.”
Future technology capable of directly detecting the spectral lines emitted by the reionization of hydrogen should be able to further clarify not just when this epoch ended, but provide critical details on how it unfolded.
“This new dataset provides a crucial benchmark against which numerical simulations of the Universe’s first billion years will be tested for years to come,” says Davies.
This research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.