NASA has again delayed the planned start of its fly-around-the-moon mission after its mega-rocket sprang a leak. The agency says the launch of Artemis II, which had been shooting for as early as Sunday in Florida, will now slip to March after engineers spotted hydrogen leaking from the Space Launch System during a two-day "wet dress rehearsal." A valve issue tied to the Orion capsule—where four astronauts will live during the roughly 10-day trip—also surfaced. NASA says teams will pore over test data before setting a new date. The crew—led by Reid Wiseman and including Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—will now leave quarantine, entering another round two weeks out.
Artemis II is set to send humans around the moon for the first time since 1972, without entering lunar orbit, in a roughly 685,000-mile journey that would mark the second flight of the SLS after 2022's uncrewed Artemis I. "With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman wrote on X, per CNN, noting the point of the dress rehearsal is to raise issues. The mission is a precursor to Artemis III, which aims for a landing near the lunar south pole and, longer term, a sustained human presence on the moon. Koch and Glover are poised to become the first woman and first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit, while Hansen would be the first non-American to do so.
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