NASA’s first manned lunar mission in more than 50 years won’t launch this month after all.
The highly anticipated Artemis II mission, which will carry four astronauts on a flight around the moon, was scheduled to launch on February 6. But after problems emerged during a critical pre-flight test on Tuesday, NASA decided not to launch the SLS rocket until March at the earliest.
A hydrogen leak was detected at the base of the SLS rocket during the so-called “wet general rehearsal,” in which engineers fuel the rocket and go through the entire launch process without actually firing the engines.
The upcoming launch window runs from February 6th to 11th, but NASA has decided it needs more time to review the situation, and probably a second sample as well. This means postponing the start date to March 6th at the earliest.
“With more than three years separating SLS launches, we fully expected to encounter challenges,” NASA chief Jared Isaacman wrote in a post on
The schedule update means the Artemis II astronauts – Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch of NASA and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency – will have a little more time on solid ground before heading into space.
This also means that another group of astronauts should head into orbit before their lunar colleagues. SpaceX’s Crew-12 – consisting of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, as well as the European Space Agency’s Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev – could head to the International Space Station as early as February 11.
At least that had been the plan until Monday, when SpaceX announced that it would ground its Falcon 9 work rocket – the same type of vehicle that will carry Crew-12 into orbit – after a problem occurred on a launch earlier in the day when its upper stage failed to perform a deorbit burn as expected.
“Teams review data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight,” the company said in a post on X.
Nowadays it is unusual for the Falcon 9 to experience anomalies. Hopefully SpaceX can fix the problem soon and pave the way for Crew-12 to fly into orbit next week as originally planned.
