NASA is already walking back its Friday announcement that it will try to launch to the moon in March, after discovering a new problem with the Artemis II rocket.
Officials said they're eyeing Tuesday, Feb. 24, to haul the rocket off the launchpad.
During a routine step to restore pressure in the Space Launch System, the team couldn't get helium to flow properly through the rocket. Helium, though not a fuel, is important because it helps protect the engines and keeps the fuel tanks at the right pressure. Though the helium system worked fine during a launch rehearsal that ended Thursday night, engineers are especially troubled knowing a similar pattern cropped up before the Artemis I launch in 2022, which didn't carry astronauts.
The affected part is the rocket's upper stage, which uses super-cold fuels — liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen — to power the mission once it’s in space. Engineers are looking at several possible causes, including a connection point between the ground equipment and the rocket, a valve in the upper stage, and a filter in the helium line. Fixing any of those issues would require work at the Vehicle Assembly Building, the rocket's enormous hangar about four miles away from the pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Unless NASA suddenly discovers a different cause that can be addressed at the pad, a delay is inevitable.
"We will begin preparations for rollback, and this will take the March launch window out of consideration," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in an X post.
Artemis II is a 10-day flight around the moon and back, testing the new Orion spaceship with humans aboard. It's the space agency's first crewed mission beyond Earth orbit since 1972. The test flight sets the stage for a moon landing during Artemis III. The overall Artemis campaign is intended to establish a permanent human presence on the moon in preparation for more challenging missions to Mars.
The four-person crew began quarantining at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday, when a launch on March 6 seemed achievable. The astronauts — Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — were released from their sequester Saturday night.
Acting quickly now could keep an April launch on the table. The windows include April 1, April 3-6, and April 30. NASA has not released future launch window dates to the public, despite requests from reporters.
At this time, the rocket is safe and using a backup method to maintain stable conditions in the upper stage, according to NASA. The upper stage is critical because it pushes the spacecraft onto its trajectory after liftoff.
NASA studied the Artemis I helium issue and confirmed the system was still working within safe limits before the inaugural launch. But given that Artemis II involves human lives, the bar is much higher on what risks the agency will accept before launching.
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NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said the team had been "up all night" from Friday to Saturday, troubleshooting the helium issues at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad. Officials plan to hold a detailed briefing on the situation later this week.
Delays are frustrating, but space missions often hit technical setbacks, and fixing issues before a crewed flight is the right move, Isaacman said.
"The President created Artemis as a program that will far surpass what America achieved during Apollo. We will return in the years ahead, we will build a Moon base, and undertake what should be continuous missions to and from the lunar environment," he wrote. "Where we begin with this architecture and flight rate is not where it will end."
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