{"id":438217,"date":"2026-02-21T16:42:13","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T16:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/438217\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T16:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T16:42:13","slug":"artemis-ii-nasa-confirm-moon-mission-set-to-launch-in-early-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/438217\/","title":{"rendered":"Artemis II: Nasa confirm Moon mission set to launch in early March"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It&#8217;s been 50 years since the US <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/newsround\/48789792\" class=\"ssrcss-15td0ur-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">last sent astronauts to the Moon<\/a>, and the United States is still the only country to do so. The mission is part of American space agency, Nasa&#8217;s long-term plan to eventually have astronauts live on the lunar surface.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The US space agency had aimed to carry out the real launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in the US state of Florida, in early February.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, during the first &#8216;wet&#8217; rehearsal of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket launch &#8211; which took place at the beginning of the month &#8211; they discovered a fault a stopped the test. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Nasa halted the countdown a little over five minutes before the end of the rehearsal because of a hydrogen leak at the launch pad.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The US Space agency announced that the launch would need to be pushed back to March and that they would investigate the issues they encountered.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">As a result, Nasa conducted a second wet rehearsal this week, and following its success, the space agency has now confirmed that the earliest date they will launch Artemis II is 6 March (US date) &#8211; which will be 7 March in the UK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s been 50 years since the US last sent astronauts to the Moon, and the United States is&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438218,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-438217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438217\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}