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Please forgive this pleading appeal. I am now doing my annual February fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black to celebrate my 73rd birthday. Your support, by donating or subscription, will allow me to continue this work as long as I am able. And I don't want to stop anytime soon.

 

And I do provide unique value. Fifteen years ago I said NASA's SLS rocket was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said its Orion capsule was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. And while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

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NASA testing SLS fuel leak repairs; UPDATE: Problems!

10:33 am

UPDATE: NASA posted a late update today describing vaguely the results of this fueling test, and revealed that while the test of the replacement seals appeared to go well, there were other problems:

During the test, teams encountered an issue with ground support equipment that reduced the flow of liquid hydrogen into the rocket. … Engineers will purge the line over the weekend to ensure proper environmental conditions and inspect the ground support equipment before replacing a filter suspected to be the cause of the reduced flow.

In other words, the SLS fueling system is like playing whack-a-mole. You fix one problem, and others show up.

I predicted this. It remains entirely possible NASA will not be able to complete a perfect full wet-dress rehearsal countdown in time to launch before April 6th, when this present launch window closes.

Original post:
———————-
NASA yesterday did an unannounced test fueling of its SLS rocket to check out the repairs in the fueling system.

NASA is loading liquid hydrogen aboard its Space Launch System moon rocket at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday for an unpublicized but crucial test of the repairs made to a leaky umbilical that derailed a countdown rehearsal on Feb. 2.

The operation to load liquid hydrogen into the huge fuel tank on the rocket’s core stage was thought to be already underway at launch complex 39B on Thursday morning. The test will determine if new seals installed in the launch pad umbilical are working. “As part of our work to assess the repair we made in the area where we saw elevated hydrogen gas concentrations during the previous wet dress rehearsal, engineers are testing the new seals by running some liquid hydrogen across the interface and partially filling the core stage liquid hydrogen tank. The data will inform the timeline for our next wet dress rehearsal,” a NASA spokesperson said about the previously unannounced test.

If the new seals work on these fueling tests, another full dress rehearsal countdown could take place as early as next week.

Posting is going to very light for the rest of the day. I am fighting a bad head cold and just want to go back to bed.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

7 comments

7 comments

  • Dick Eagleson
    February 13, 2026 at 3:23 pm

    My sympathies, Robert. I am still slowly getting over exactly such an affliction myself. The “common cold” seems both more common than usual and nastier this year. Take care of yourself.

  • Gary
    February 13, 2026 at 6:32 pm

    Eric Berger says nasa buried the lede.

    https://x.com/sciguyspace/status/2022477249497403606?s=46

    “Yikes. NASA couldn’t even complete a test of the SLS rocket’s ground system seal for liquid hydrogen because something else broke with the ground systems. And they wait until 8 pm ET Friday to send an update on something they knew last night.“

  • Robert Zimmerman
    February 13, 2026 at 8:46 pm

    Gary: I added this NASA update to my story earlier today on these tests.

  • Ray Van Dune
    February 13, 2026 at 8:46 pm

    If SLS cannot demonstrate the ability to reliably launch within a fairly constrained timeframe, how will it be able to synchronize with HLS, which has its own timing constraints imposed by the need for multiple on-orbit refillings, supported by multiple launches?

    SLS is an Apollo-era solution trying to mate up with a Starship-era solution: their constraints just don’t work together!

  • Richard M
    February 13, 2026 at 9:40 pm

    You know, when your launch cadence is not even once every three years, perhaps things like this are not so surprising?

    Casey Handmer’s reaction was even more scathing than Berger’s:

    Just to be clear here, NASA declared its recent test a “successful wet dress rehearsal” despite missing its T-30s target by almost five minutes, botching the dreaded Orion hatch close out procedure, and managing to achieve up to 16% H2 due to copious leakage at the fueling interface. For reference, the lower flammability limit, and system requirement, is just 4%, beyond which this nightmare fuel can burn and detonate in air.

    The “wet dress” was so successful, in fact, that they have to do it all over again in the unspecified near future. But before that, the same team ran a “(no) confidence test” on the leaky fueling interface which failed badly enough that they buried it until 8pm on the following Friday.

    The SLS ground support budget runs at $650m per year, and they’ve had 1173 days since the last test to get this right.

    Coincidentally it also took 1173 days for Hyman Rickover and his team to ship the world’s first nuclear power reactor, wrapped in a fully functional submarine, for about a third of the total cost of the SLS’s botched ground support equipment, in the 1950s. What a difference a serious team makes!

    Furthermore, we are assured that the engineering on SLS/Orion is so rigorous and the team is so elite that it’s totally okay to test fly this turkey with four currently living astronauts on it, not to Low Earth Orbit like some kind of participation trophy Starliner repeat, but all the way around the Moon, on a completely unique, untested configuration.

    https://x.com/i/status/2022523940359279037

    Actually, he gets even more caustic than that, but I don’t want to clog up Bob’s combox with even more text — you can read it all at the link. Of course, our host requires no convincing — he has been making many of these points for years.

    It’s so depressing.

  • Richard M
    February 13, 2026 at 9:44 pm

    Hello Ray,

    “If SLS cannot demonstrate the ability to reliably launch within a fairly constrained timeframe, how will it be able to synchronize with HLS, which has its own timing constraints imposed by the need for multiple on-orbit refillings, supported by multiple launches?”

    I think that was a key reason why NASA stipulated a 100 day loiter time in lunar orbit requirement for HLS bids — so that they had the cushion to blow through a few months of lunar launch windows if they needed it.

  • Robert Zimmerman
    February 13, 2026 at 10:13 pm

    Richard M wrote, “Our host requires no convincing — he has been making many of these points for years.”

    To deaf ears I might add. Even now, no one quotes me in these matters. I consistently predict what is going to happen with a very high percentage of rightness, but no one appears to hear.

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