{"id":318315,"date":"2026-02-03T16:45:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-03T16:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/318315\/"},"modified":"2026-02-03T16:45:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T16:45:07","slug":"nasa-moves-artemis-2-launch-to-march-after-hydrogen-leak-during-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/318315\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA moves Artemis 2 launch to March after hydrogen leak during testing"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA started making the final preparations<\/a> for the Artemis 2 mission in early January, with the hopes of opening its launch window as soon as February 6. After issues showed up during the mission\u2019s wet dress rehearsal in the early hours of February 3, however, the agency had to push back<\/a> its earliest launch opportunity to March.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges. That is precisely why we conduct a wet dress rehearsal. These tests are designed to surface issues before flight and set up launch day with the highest probability of success,\u201d NASA administrator<\/a> Jared Isaacman said on X<\/a>.<\/p>\n

During a wet dress rehearsal, the spacecraft to be used for a mission is loaded with propellants to simulate the actual preparations and countdown to liftoff. NASA explained that Artemis 2\u2019s Space Launch System, which was already on the launch pad, suffered from a liquid hydrogen leak that its engineers spent hours troubleshooting. They were ultimately able to fill all the rocket\u2019s tanks and started the countdown to launch. But with approximately five minutes left in the countdown, the ground launch sequencer automatically stopped due to a spike in the spacecraft\u2019s liquid hydrogen leak rate.<\/p>\n

The agency admits that it has other issues to fix, based on what happened during the rehearsal. It has to make sure that the cold weather doesn\u2019t affect the mission\u2019s equipment during the actual launch in the same way it did in testing . The Orion crew module\u2019s hatch pressurization process took longer than expected, and that should must not happen on launch day. NASA also has to troubleshoot the audio communication channels for its ground teams after they dropped several times during the rehearsal. Artemis\u2019 ground crew will review data from the wet dress rehearsal and address the aforementioned problems. NASA then has to conduct another test to confirm that they were taken care of before announcing the mission\u2019s launch window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA started making the final preparations for the Artemis 2 mission in early January, with the hopes of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[270],"tags":[4401,18,19,17,154167,25877,1024,133,451,154166],"class_list":["post-318315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-artemis","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-launch-day","tag-launch-window","tag-nasa","tag-science","tag-space","tag-wet-dress-rehearsal"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116007713008054837","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}