BREAKING: NASA scrubs Artemis moon shot ... again

In the past week, their words have been prophetic. On Saturday, when NASA tried for a second time to launch the Artemis I mission’s Space Launch System rocket, a leak in a hydrogen fuel line stymied engineers. They tried several times to fix it before the launch director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, decided at 11:17 a.m. that it was time to scrub the day’s flight.

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NASA will have to try again another day. The rocket is to propel an uncrewed Orion capsule to the moon. There are opportunities on Monday and Tuesday, but if the agency is not able to pursue them, it would have to wait until later in September or sometime in October.

Lots of launches do not get off the ground on the first try. A couple of years ago, SpaceX’s first launch of NASA astronauts — the first such launch from American soil since the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles — reached the countdown’s final minutes before the flight was delayed because of bad weather. It launched three days later.

Lots of launches do not get off the ground on the second try, either.

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