Overview
- A wet dress rehearsal on February 3 reached T‑5 minutes before a ground sequencer halted the countdown due to an increasing hydrogen leak rate.
- Teams traced the issue to a liquid‑hydrogen leak at a core‑stage interface during fueling, prompting holds, hardware warmups, and propellant flow adjustments.
- NASA dropped the February launch window and identified March as the earliest opportunity, with the crew released from quarantine until closer to the next attempt.
- Artemis II will send Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen on a roughly 10‑day free‑return lunar flyby aboard Orion without a landing.
- Separately, an investigation into a SpaceX Falcon 9 anomaly could delay the Crew‑12 mission to the ISS carrying French astronaut Sophie Adenot.