On Monday, after rolling the SLS rocket to be used for the Artemis II mission to the pad in January, NASA attempted its first wet-dress test with this new vehicle. At one of the main interfaces where liquid hydrogen enters the vehicle, a leak developed, not dissimilar to problems that occurred with the Artemis I rocket three years ago.

If the countdown and fueling test go well, four astronauts will set their sights on a Super Bowl Sunday launch to the moon.

NASA is getting ready to launch its massive, fully expendable rocket for the first crewed flight to the Moon since Apollo. The agency’s new era of spaceflight comes with a few parts from its past, specifically three rocket engines that have previously flown on space shuttle missions.

The rocket is about to traverse four miles to the launchpad — at about 1 mph.

More than 700,000 gallons of cryogenic propellant that will pass through Space Launch System plumbing will flow, we will never get a single astronaut into the cabin of Orion, and that is the point. In Artemis 2,

NASA ran into a leak while fuelling its new moon rocket Monday in one final make-or-break test that will determine when astronauts can launch on a lunar fly-around.

With the wet dress rehearsal, essentially a critical fueling test of the Artemis 2 Space Launch System moon rocket, now back on Feb. 2, NASA said in a statement that it can no longer target Feb. 6 or Feb. 7, the first two days of its launch window. The Artemis 2 launch window originally ran from Feb. 6 to Feb. 10.