NASA hopes to fix Artemis II moon rocket leak with on-pad repair
NASA plans to test the planned leak repair with a second dress rehearsal fueling test later this month.
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Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of "Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia."
NASA plans to test the planned leak repair with a second dress rehearsal fueling test later this month.
NASA says it can't try until March at the earliest to send a crewed spacecraft on a flight around the moon and back, due to hydrogen leaks during testing of the Artemis II rocket.
If the countdown and fueling test go well, four astronauts will set their sights on a Super Bowl Sunday launch to the moon.
The first Artemis moonshot with a crew is now targeted for no earlier than Feb. 8, two days later than planned.
Four Artemis II astronauts plan to fly around the moon and back next month, traveling farther from Earth than any humans before them.
Depending on the timing, NASA could launch a fresh crew to the space station while four other astronauts are flying around the moon.
Four space station Crew 11 fliers splashed down off the Southern California coast at 3:41 a.m. ET, closing out a 167-day stay in space cut short by a medical issue.
Outgoing space station commander Mike Fincke, a member of the returning Crew 11, turned the station over to cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, saying the combined crew had developed deep friendships.
Mike Fincke thanked NASA for making crew health the agency's top priority.
A planned spacewalk outside the International Space Station was scrapped because of what NASA called a "medical concern" with an unidentified crew member.
NASA said the unidentified astronaut is "stable," but the agency is considering all options, including a possible early return to Earth for Crew 11
NASA is gearing up to send four Artemis astronauts on looping test flight around the moon in 2026.
German engineer Michaela Benthaus is the first person with a significant physical handicap to reach space.
Russian Soyuz crews are now spending eight months aboard the space station instead of six to stretch supplies and lower costs.
The new space station crew includes American Chris Williams, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy and is a board-certified medical physicist at Harvard Medical School.