A fuel leak at the base of the SLS rocket has forced NASA to again postpone the launch of the first mission of the Artemis lunar exploration program, which aims to resume exploration of the satellite with astronauts in the middle of this decade. The launch was to take place today between 8:17 p.m. and 10:17 p.m. (Spanish peninsular time), so about eight hours before the loading of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks that feed the rocket engines during takeoff has begun. But shortly after starting to load the hydrogen, which is at 253 degrees below zero, a leak has been detected in the lower part of the rocket. Weather conditions today were quite favorable for launch, with a 20% chance of having to abort takeoff due to weather John Raoux / AP Engineers have stopped fueling operations three times and tried three different solutions. None of the three has worked: as soon as the hydrogen charge has been resumed, the leak has repeated itself. At 5:19 p.m., with more than two hours behind schedule in pre-launch operations, NASA announced that it was postponing the launch until a new date that has not yet been announced. It is the second time that technical problems have forced the postponement of the launch of the SLS rocket after the previous attempt to launch the mission was suspended on Monday, August 29, due to a different failure. The problem has been located in the conduit “where liquid hydrogen is introduced into the rocket,” a NASA spokesman reported after the launch was annulled. This failure did not occur on Monday, when this same conduit worked correctly. NASA has not yet provided information on the possible causes of the problem. On Monday the launch was aborted because one of the four engines located in the lower part of the rocket seemed not to have cooled properly, an essential operation for it to work properly during takeoff when liquid hydrogen reached 253 degrees below zero and liquid oxygen reached 183 below zero. Subsequent analyzes by NASA have concluded that the engine was cooled as it should and that the only thing that had failed was a temperature sensor, which gave an erroneous measurement instead of indicating the actual temperature of the engine. This news will be updated in the next few minutes