NASA Delays Artemis II To March
5 49ClickOnThis writes: NASA has delayed the Artemis II launch to March of this year, after a wet dress-rehearsal uncovered a hydrogen leak. From the NASA article:
During tanking, engineers spent several hours troubleshooting a liquid hydrogen leak in an interface used to route the cryogenic propellant into the rocket's core stage, putting them behind in the countdown. Attempts to resolve the issue involved stopping the flow of liquid hydrogen into the core stage, allowing the interface to warm up for the seals to reseat, and adjusting the flow of the propellant.
Teams successfully filled all tanks in both the core stage and interim cryogenic propulsion stage before a team of five was sent to the launch pad to finish Orion closeout operations. Engineers conducted a first run at terminal countdown operations during the test, counting down to approximately 5 minutes left in the countdown, before the ground launch sequencer automatically stopped the countdown due to a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate.
5 comments
Re:Completely Predictable (Score: 5, Insightful)
by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @03:47PM (#65967256)
There's always at least 1 hydrogen valve issue. Perhaps they should redesign their valves?
There's always at least 1 hydrogen leak issue. Perhaps they should redesign their rocket.
Valves, connectors, o-rings shrinking from cold temperatures, loose pins blowing out at high speed causing tiny nicks in tubing that hydrogen leaks through very easily... these are just a few of the many ways hydrogen can go wrong.
Hydrogen is not the answer. Hydrogen is the question. "H*ll, no" is the answer. In any sane universe, it's far better to have to lift 80% more fuel for your upper stages than to keep canceling or delaying launches for months at a time to avoid blowing up... and still blow up once (Challenger) and almost twice (Columbia in 1999).
IMO, it was a big mistake to go with hydrogen as the main engine fuel, and anyone who studied the history of the shuttle should have reached that conclusion long before Artemis was planned, or even Ares. But it was more important to keep jobs in the districts where the Space Shuttle main engines were manufactured than it was to build something reliable, so we got the best design that a committee of career politicians could produce.
Now we're stuck with it, at least until SpaceX has a human-rated Starship launch vehicle. And at that point, I hope the remaining Artemis hardware will be quietly scrapped as the mistake that it was.
Re:Completely Predictable (Score: 5, Informative)
by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @04:01PM (#65967282)
In any sane universe, it's far better to have to lift 80% more fuel for your upper stages than to keep canceling or delaying launches for months at a time to avoid blowing up...
That depends entirely on your goal, so a judgement of sanity isn't really on point.
One could also argue that, in a sane universe, it's far worse to have to lift 80% more fuel for your upper stages (and not to mention the required additional fuel on the lower stages to life the extra fuel for your upper stages) than to delay a launch. Hell, one could argue it's fucking absurd, unless one also gets super excited about it taking a month of orbital refueling to get your rocket.... well, fucking anywhere.
Realistically, we need to get better at handling hydrogen.
I'm aware of its problems, but I think much of the extant problems are because it's too easy to just "work around them", rather than really fix them.
at least until SpaceX has a human-rated Starship launch vehicle.
lol... A human-rated Starship... isn't going *anywhere* fucking close to the moon, unless we've also got a magical fuel depot waiting in orbit for it, itself fueled by a dozen or so launches, waiting for it.
Re:Completely Predictable (Score: 5, Informative)
by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @04:54PM (#65967382)
Part of the reason (not all) that Starship will require so much fuel is because of its size and payload capability
I'd say more so it's construction from steel. Size doesn't really play a large role, and empty space is quite cheap to launch.
I only say this because the details matter. It's not as if swapping Methane for Hydrogen lends itself to an Apples-to-Apples comparison. It's more complicated than that.
Absolutely- it's not apples-to-apples.
However, the efficiency increase would be enough to turn an Earth-to-Moon Starship mission from "Every trip is an appreciable fraction of the logistical difficulty of building the fucking ISS" to, "alright- that's not bad."
And this is ignoring that both things parent mentioned had nothing to do with hydrogen, anyway.
Musk uses methane because he dreams of refueling the thing on Mars, which is also why it's focus is on its frankly absurd refueling requirement, rather than trying to make the thing actually good at going places locally.
Re:Completely Predictable (Score: 5, Informative)
by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @04:45PM (#65967368)
One could also argue that, in a sane universe, it's far worse to have to lift 80% more fuel for your upper stages (and not to mention the required additional fuel on the lower stages to life the extra fuel for your upper stages) than to delay a launch. Hell, one could argue it's fucking absurd, unless one also gets super excited about it taking a month of orbital refueling to get your rocket.... well, fucking anywhere.
A 1.8x increase in fuel consumption is not going to make it take a month unless it was already going to take 18 days with hydrogen. We're not talking about orders of magnitude here. We're talking about a relatively small difference in the amount of energy per unit of mass. And in exchange for that relatively small reduction in payload capacity, launches have to endure constant failures that more traditional launch systems don't.
Even ignoring the risk of embrittlement causing an in-space disaster, I'm pretty sure nobody is seriously considering using hydrogen for orbital refueling because of the leaks alone. There's no way to fix them in space, so you'd have to launch your fuel right before you need it. For that reason alone, I don't think they're even seriously considering it for refueling on Mars. Hydrogen is being used for getting humans into orbit and lifting payloads. The only refueling that I'm aware of is by Starship, whose in-orbit parts are methane-based.
Realistically, we need to get better at handling hydrogen.
Realistically, NASA and its contractors have been struggling to achieve that for more than fifty years and still haven't pulled off. I mean sure, people who don't try again after a failure never succeed, but if you keep trying over and over and still don't succeed, at some point, it makes sense to acknowledge that you're never going to be good enough and stop trying. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And here we are 50 years later, and hydrogen leaks still are repeatedly unmanageable. They're not even trying to stop leaks completely — just keep them below the threshold where the rocket would blow up. Yikes.
For orbital refueling to be possible with hydrogen, you'd need to stop leaks completely, and have the whole system remain leak-free after enduring the shock of getting launched into space. I would not want to place bets on that happening any time soon.
I'm aware of its problems, but I think much of the extant problems are because it's too easy to just "work around them", rather than really fix them.
To some degree, sure. On the flip side, other than the engines themselves, somebody designed this thing from scratch relatively recently. They could have designed it to be slightly bigger with methane for the top stage fuel, and you wouldn't *need* to solve any of those problems, because they would be solved by virtue of the fuel not being such a pain in the a** to work with.
It's one thing to solve problems that have to be solved. It's another to spend huge amounts of money to solve problems primarily because politicians insisted on reusing leftover shuttle parts to keep jobs in their districts. If throwing a little bit more fuel at the problem solves a problem, I say throw more fuel at the problem.
at least until SpaceX has a human-rated Starship launch vehicle.
lol... A human-rated Starship... isn't going *anywhere* fucking close to the moon, unless we've also got a magical fuel depot waiting in orbit for it, itself fueled by a dozen or so launches, waiting for it.
A human-rated Starship is exactly what they're planning to land on the moon. And it uses methane. And yes, they're planning to use multiple refueling launches to get it into the correct orbit.
Deja Vu? (Score: 5, Informative)
by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @03:07PM (#65967182)
Freezing temperatures in Florida. Leaking o-rings. Fuel leak.
Why do I have this sense of deja vu?
For the record, I fully expected the launch to be delayed. just Artemis things.