NASA technicians were unable to prevent hydrogen from leaking from the rocket’s highly flammable fuel system, which resulted in the cancellation of the Artemis 1 moon mission for a second time. The launch was scheduled to take place on Saturday, but it was called off only hours before.
It won’t be until Monday or Tuesday before the next launch window opens up, and that’s only if the engineers are successful in finding a solution to the potentially catastrophic issue that keeps cropping up.
The unmanned project, which cost a total of $4.1 billion and is part of the U.S. plan to build a base on the moon from which people could be sent to Mars, has had a number of technical problems.
While the government organization was working to load its new 322-foot rocket with over one million gallons of supercooled hydrogen fuel, the leak started early on Saturday morning. On Saturday, the highly flammable accelerant started pouring from the bottom area of the engine, which had experts scurrying to find a solution to the problem.
The last launch attempt that NASA made on Monday was aborted, and the space agency decided to keep its cargo of three test dummies on the ground rather than send them into orbit around the moon.
