A NASA spacecraft is now back on its launchpad ahead of the first lunar exploration mission in more than 50 years, after a month of delays.
The space agency’s Artemis II mission – part of NASA’s long-term plans to build a space station called Lunar Gateway, where astronauts will be able to live and work – will take the crew further than humans have ever ventured in space before.
It was set to get underway on 8 February, but a liquid hydrogen leak during a practice launch forced the agency to delay the operation.
In a post on its website, NASA said it was now targeting a launch window from 1 April to 6 April.
Read more: Everything to know about Artemis II
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It added that engineers had started work to roll the Artemis II space launch system rocket, and its Orion spacecraft, to Launch Pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Thursday night.
A livestream on NASA’s YouTube channel shows the rocket is now in place.
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Elsewhere, the agency said the four-astronaut crew had entered quarantine in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday, “to ensure they stay healthy leading up to launch”.
The crew includes three US astronauts – Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – and Canadian Jeremy Hansen.
During the 10-day mission, the crew on Artemis II will test life support, navigation and communication systems to confirm everything operates as it should in deep space.
Many of these tests will be completed while the capsule is still in the Earth’s orbit, so the astronauts are closer to home if anything goes wrong.
The capsule will then enter Earth’s high orbit, where the crew will manually pilot Orion before control is handed back to controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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Artemis I launched in November 2022. It involved sending an empty Orion crew capsule to circle the moon to ultimately test NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
