Safety First

Launch delayed 'til March due to hydrogen leaks, a balky hatch, need to launch a crew to Space Station, and geometry with the Moon.
Next opportunities: March 6, 7, 8, 9, 11.
For the familes & friends it's a big midwinter disruption of plans. For the Artemis crew & @NASA it's… pic.twitter.com/PkBzyKaNIv

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 3, 2026

It's a bummer that Artemis II has been pushed back to next month, no doubt.  And I'm glad it is; no Go Fever, please.  Gonna bust out one my favorite space quotes, coming from NASA's safety chief, Jerry Lederer, almost 60 years ago:

Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and one and one half million systems, subsystems, and assemblies. Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect fifty-six hundred defects…

I can't find a definitive number, but today's mission stack (SLS launch platform and Orion vehicle) is at least 3,000,000 parts.  A couple (or more) of them didn't work as expected during the WDR, so it is a Good Thing that NASA isn't rushing, even if a lot of people are impatient to get back to the Moon.

As Richard Feynman observed:

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate)... 

[R]eality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Space is hard.  Be safe, be smart.

Selah.