ANKARA

NASA delayed the launch of its crewed Artemis II mission to the moon until March on Tuesday, following a significant hydrogen leak during a critical fueling test of the Space Launch System (SLS).

The agency had been targeting a February launch window from Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida, but announced a one-month delay after problems emerged during a two-day wet dress rehearsal simulating launch procedures.

During the test, more than 2.6 million liters (700,000 gallons) of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen were loaded into the 322-foot (98-meter) rocket.

Engineers detected a leak in an interface responsible for routing cryogenic hydrogen into the SLS core stage, leading to a spike that forced the automatic termination of the countdown with five minutes remaining.

NASA said engineers “pushed through several challenges,” including the hydrogen leak and a pressurization valve issue on the Orion capsule.

Teams also faced complications caused by cold weather and communication dropouts.

Due to the schedule change, the four Artemis II astronauts -- Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen -- will exit their initial quarantine and re-enter isolation roughly two weeks before the next launch attempt.

Artemis II will mark the first crewed mission of the Artemis program and the first human flight beyond low Earth orbit since 1972’s Apollo 17.

The mission includes a lunar flyby and a 685,000-mile (1.1-million-kilometer) round trip.

The astronauts will not enter lunar orbit, but the mission sets the stage for Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts near the moon’s south pole.

NASA said it will review all data from the rehearsal, address the issues and determine a new launch date.