NASA’s test run of its Artemis II countdown ran into problems Monday at Kennedy Space Center, scrapping any chance of the moonbound mission launching this month.

Instead, the agency is targeting March as the earliest possible date for Artemis II, which will be the first crewed mission on the Orion spacecraft and the first time humans will fly around the moon in more than half a century.

“With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is precisely why we conduct a wet dress rehearsal.”

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will now have to wait. The quartet had been in quarantine in Houston since Jan. 23 and were expected to arrive to KSC later Tuesday had there been a viable February launch opportunity.

Instead, the next launch windows will be between March 6 and 11, then between April 1 and 6.

The issues at Launch Pad 39-B were similar to headaches involving cryogenic liquid hydrogen, or LH2, seen during the Artemis I testing and launch attempts in 2022.

NASA had to pause loading propellant into the Space Launch System rocket several times on Monday, although it ultimately was able get the rocket filled with the 700,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

The countdown automatically stopped when sensors detected a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate, causing the test run to be called off with 5:15 on the countdown clock.

Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said the leak was located in the line that connects the new 1.4 million gallon sphere full of LH2 to the rocket — specifically in a cavity with both 8-inch wide and 4-inch wide drain lines that are used to bleed excess gas.

It was still unclear, however, from where exactly the LH2 was escaping.

“We really need to get into the plate and take a look, and we’ll know more in a few days when we get in there,” she said.

The good news is that teams expect to be able to deal with the issue at the launch pad and won’t have to slow-roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building.

John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis two mission management team, said that while the rocket’s attachments are new, the majority of the ground equipment is the same as it was during Artemis I.

“When you’re dealing with hydrogen, it’s a small molecule, it’s highly energetic, and we like it for that reason, and we do the best we can,” he said. “This one caught us off guard. … We either had some sort of misalignment or some sort of deformation or debris on the seal.”

The plan for the test, which had begun Saturday night about two days before a planned target T-0, was to perform operations as if it were a launch day, but without crew on board.

The closeout crew, who would be in charge of sealing the astronauts into the Orion capsule, did venture onto the pad — where they encountered their own issues. A valve related to Orion’s hatch pressurization vented unexpectedly and it took much longer than planned to finish operations.

NASA said the test also faced intermittent ground audio dropouts and cold-weather impacts to some cameras amid record-breaking cold in the area.

“The big takeaway was we got a chance for the rocket to talk to us, and it did just that,” Honeycutt said. “The test gave us exactly what we needed. It was an opportunity for us to wring out the system, as well as the team before we ask our crew to go fly on launch day.”

Isaacman said teams will review this test’s data, troubleshoot each issue and make repairs with plans to perform a second wet dress rehearsal on the pad and then target a March launch date.

“As always, safety remains our top priority, for our astronauts, our workforce, our systems and the public,” Isaacman said. “We will only launch when we believe we are as ready to undertake this historic mission.”

The 600,000-mile trip will take the crew about 6,000 miles past the far side of the moon, breaking the record set by Apollo 13 as the farthest any human has traveled from Earth. Glover will become the first Black man, Kock the first woman and Hansen the first non-American to venture out to the moon.

Nine of the Apollo program’s missions flew to the moon with six making a landing. Only 12 men have ever set foot on the moon.

NASA looks to change that with the follow-on mission Artemis III, which the Trump administration is vying to fly before the end of his second and last term in 2028.

“This is just the beginning. It marks the start of an Artemis program that will evolve to support repeated and affordable missions to the moon,” Isaacman said. “Getting this mission right means returning to the moon to stay, and a future to Artemis 100 and beyond.”

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