Returning to the Moon will need the development of new and larger rockets, one of which NASA will test this Friday and Saturday. The exam, however, will be completed in complete quiet, ostensibly to avoid duplication. Officially, this isn’t because NASA is worried about another country gaining an advantage in Moon Race 2, but rather because someone may figure out how to make stronger ballistic missiles. Not everyone, though, is convinced. Although NASA outsources many of its activities to corporations like SpaceX, it still does a lot in-house, including the development of the Space Launch System (SLS), an upgraded version of the space shuttle.
The uncrewed Artemis 1 mission and a few tiny satellites will be launched by SLS first, perhaps this northern summer. If everything goes well, it will launch a series of missions to study the solar system’s furthest reaches, as well as the next wave of human lunar landings. Perhaps one day it will send the first humans to Mars. The first SLS will go through a wet dress rehearsal, in which its supercold (cryogenic) propellants will be loaded and drained, and the pre-launch procedure will be gone through, before the actual launch.
“The most challenging and thrilling test we’ve done on the rocket so far,” NASA’s Sharon Cobb said. The ability to keep the process going before restarting will also be put to the test. This is set to begin on Friday, according to NASA. If all goes according to plan, the wet dress rehearsal will end on Sunday when the tanks are drained. Historically, rocket launches have sought maximum attention as shows of national and corporate pride, at least in the United States. Artemis is being heavily promoted by NASA, for example, through its “clickable rocket” website. So it came as a shock when NASA stated on Tuesday that “the agency will transmit live footage of the rocket on the pad, without audio or commentary […]” in a news release. Wet dress rehearsal will not include any in-person media activity.”
When questioned about it at a later news conference. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations, according to NASA’s Tom Whitmeyer, are meant to prevent innovative weapons systems from being reproduced by America’s adversaries. Knowing the timing of phases in the cryogenic preparation, according to Whitmeyer, might benefit someone who wants to create a ballistic missile system. It’s reasonable that such issues are now at the forefront of US officials’ minds in a manner that they haven’t been in a long time. However, according to Gizmodo, not everyone is pleased with this answer.
“Also cryogenics are typically horrible for ballistic missile systems,” Baylor added, listing all the private launch providers that broadcast their countdowns. Others remarked on how much more open NASA was in the past. “The problem with any such security mandate is that it is typically not being enforced by the people who have the necessary technical understanding to know what is actually helpful to others […] so, it gets enforced wildly over-enthusiastically, to the point where the degree to which it impedes free communication is more harmful than any risk that it protects against,” McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Gizmodo.
Is NASA aware of something its detractors are unaware of, or are they simply being extremely cautious? Is there another reason they’d like to keep some features of the wet dress hidden? NASA may have attracted more attention to the rehearsal as a result of this maneuver than if they had just broadcast the audio, a sort of ballistic counterpart of the Streisand Effect. Perhaps more information will leak (hopefully not as much as the cryogenics), but we’ll have to wait until the actual launch, which is scheduled for June, for answers to these questions.
