Late last month, the four daring NASA astronauts who are scheduled to venture around the Moon and back as part of the agency’s historic Artemis 2 mission entered quarantine.
Their ride, a small Orion capsule mounted atop the agency’s enormous Space Launch System rocket, has already been rolled onto Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
But the agency’s remaining checks ahead of the launch — a gauntlet of tests called the “wet dress rehearsal” that involves running through the full launch sequence without a crew on board — didn’t quite go as planned, forcing the agency to officially push back the launch date from its already ambitious early February timeline.
In an official statement this morning, NASA revealed that we may have to wait another four weeks for humanity’s return to the Moon, with the agency now eyeing a second wet dress rehearsal for “March as the earliest possible launch opportunity.”
The crew is officially released from quarantine, the agency said, as it awaits the next launch window.
It may not be the news we wanted to hear — but at least now, NASA’s Artemis 2 mission won’t have to compete with the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics for media attention.
According to a February 2 statement, NASA found that the rocket’s core stage had sprung a leak and that efforts to correct it “proved unsuccessful.”
“The leak rate at the interface of the tail service mast umbilical continued to exceed the allowable limits,” the update reads. “Liquid hydrogen filling operations on both the core stage and upper stage are paused as the team meets to determines next steps.”
As a result, the tentative February 8 launch date is no longer on the table.
Fortunately, the leak appeared to be the only major hiccup during this week’s test. NASA engineers “pushed through several challenges during the two-day test and met many of the planned objectives,” according to the agency.
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