NASA to try Artemis II test run again, could set up March moonshot

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Feb 17, 2026

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NASA is looking to make sure the problems with leaks in its moon rocket have been remedied with another Artemis II test run slated for Thursday night that could set up a launch in early March.

Teams tried to run through what’s called a wet dress rehearsal on Feb. 2 but ran into familiar problems with leaks of cryogenic liquid hydrogen flowing from ground equipment into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-B.

Similar leaks caused issued during 2022’s Artemis I mission test run and eventual launch. That was the first and so far only flight of the SLS rocket, which sent the Orion spacecraft on an uncrewed trip around the moon.

Artemis II comes more than three years later, aiming to be the first human spaceflight for Orion with a crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

NASA won’t set an official launch date until it completes this second wet dress rehearsal, but the earliest possible liftoff would be March 6.

The 10-day mission would send the quartet out past the moon, farther than any human has traveled from Earth. It’s designed to prove Orion can support regular human missions to the moon and set up Artemis III, which aims to return people to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

On the first wet dress rehearsal, NASA was able to load the SLS rocket core and upper stages with 700,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX), but during the final test countdown run, an LH2 supply line leak into the core stage exceeded acceptable limits and cut the test short.

For the redo, teams look to complete the skipped procedural tests from the first run while also ensuring fixes done to the LH2 supply line were successful.

Last week, NASA went through a smaller confidence test on those fixes after having replaced some seals on the connection between the ground equipment and the rocket. That didn’t go smoothly, though, as the supply line into the rocket saw a new issue with reduced flow of propellant.

Engineers over the weekend replaced a filter in the ground equipment they suspected was to blame, and NASA gave the green light to try a full tanking test this week.

Teams will be called to stations Tuesday night at 6:40 p.m. and run through a full, nearly 50-hour test countdown to a T-0 of 8:30 p.m. Thursday, with a four-hour window to complete the test objectives.

While the Artemis II astronauts won’t venture out to the pad, their support closeout crew will be back trying to improve on efforts seen during the Feb. 2 test, simulating as if it were an actual launch including hatch closure on Orion.

The big task on NASA’s to-do list not performed on the first wet dress rehearsal is a countdown clock reset. Teams will run the clock down on a first run of the final 10 minutes before a simulated launch, called terminal count. But at T-33 seconds, teams will reset the clock and run it down again to just under T-30 seconds.

The last step is to once again remove all the propellant from the rocket.

Teams will then review the data and could then target a launch date.

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