Photos: NASA's Artemis I Moon Mission Launch Delayed Again By Technical Issues

The U.S. space agency has decided to push back its Artemis launch again due to a hydrogen leak.

By Aylin Woodward, Micah Maidenberg & Dave Cole
Updated Sept. 3, 2022
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NASA said it encountered a hydrogen leak that emerged during fueling and couldn’t be contained despite different attempts to fix it, and decided to once again delay a potential launch attempt of its massive moon rocket.

Eva Marie Uzcategui for The Wall Street Journal

No astronaut has stood on the lunar surface since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Funding and policy priorities shifted after the Apollo missions, but now NASA is trying to get people back to the moon and build a long-term presence there.

NASA/European Pressphoto Agency

The U.S. space agency had planned to launch an important test flight, called Artemis I, as soon as Monday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA postponed the launch attempt due to an engine problem. It is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions aimed at returning astronauts to the moon.

Eva Marie Uzcategui for The Wall Street Journal

The launch will be a practice run for the agency’s big rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, and the spacecraft sitting on top, named Orion. SLS is meant to blast Orion off of Earth and toward an orbit around the moon.

Craig Bailey/Florida Today/Associated Press

A test version of NASA’s Orion spacecraft is shown here. Orion will travel to a lunar orbit after blast off. Later, its crew capsule will return to Earth, with a splashdown later expected in the Pacific Ocean.

Pete Reutt/NASA

Orion won’t be carrying astronauts during the mission, and it will be controlled from Earth. The flight will have a manikin and two manikin torsos on board. NASA will use those devices in part to test for radiation exposure.

NASA

The next Artemis mission, slated for no earlier than 2024, is expected to transport four astronauts to lunar orbit. The third Artemis mission a year later would put astronauts on the moon, and NASA has said its goal is to bring the first woman and the first person of color to the lunar surface.

Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP/Getty Images

NASA has said it plans to showcase imagery of Earth captured by the Orion spacecraft as it travels to the moon. Here, a photo of the planet from the moon taken during the Apollo 17 mission nearly 50 years ago.

NASA/RDB/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

Produced by Dave Cole

Cover image credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui for The Wall Street Journal