NASA announced the second postponement in the space of a week, now defining March as “the earliest possible launch date for the Artemis II mission.”
NASA announced today that, due to a fuel leak detected during test flights, it will postpone the launch of the Artemis II mission, which was scheduled for next weekend, until at least March.
The North American space agency announced the postponement, the second in the space of a week, on its official channels, now defining March as “the earliest possible launch date for the Artemis II mission.”
On Friday, NASA had already postponed the launch for two days due to bad weather conditions.
The postponement of the mission also means that the four astronauts who would travel on the rocket will leave the quarantine that began on January 21st to ensure ideal health conditions and will only return to quarantine two weeks before a new release date is set.
At the same time, NASA is preparing a manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS), whose launch is dependent on the date set for Artemis II of NASA’s new Artemis lunar program that aims to “test systems and equipment” for the Artemis III mission, scheduled for 2027, and which will place astronauts on the surface of the Moon again, predictably part of the crew that will follow on Artemis II.
Only North American astronauts, all men, were in orbit and on the surface of the Moon, between the late 1960s and early 1970s, under NASA’s Apollo lunar program.
The first unmanned flight of the Artemis program took place in November 2022 and served to test the performance of the reusable Orion spacecraft, which has a European-made module, and the SLS rocket, NASA’s most powerful, whose inaugural launch was preceded by several vicissitudes.
With the Artemis program, the United States hopes to prepare astronauts for missions to the Moon and trips to Mars, the planet they aim to reach from 2030 onwards.
The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which governs space exploration and to which countries such as Portugal are linked, defines astronauts as envoys of humanity.
