What went wrong with Artemis I was on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center, so that's where NASA has decided to try and fix it.

On Tuesday, mission managers announced they would hold off rolling back to the Vehicle Assembly Building the 5.75 million-pound, 322-foot-tall combination of the Space Launch System rocket, Orion capsule and mobile launcher.

Instead, they will stay at Launch Pad 39-B to work on the source of the Saturday's scrub, which was the second scrub of NASA's attempt to send the uncrewed Artemis I on a multiweek mission to the moon. It's the first step in its eventual plans to return humans, including the first woman, to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

Space is a hostile, extreme environment. It's only a matter of time before ordinary people are exposed to this environment, either by engaging in space tourism or by joining self-sustaining colonies far away from Earth.

To this end, there needs to be a much better understanding of how the environmental dangers of space will affect the biology of our cells, tissues, organs, and cognition. Crucially for future space colonies, we need to know whether we can easily reproduce in environments other than those found on Earth.

The effects of radiation on our cells, producing DNA damage, are well documented. What's less clear is how lower levels of gravity, what scientists call microgravity, will affect the mechanisms and rhythms taking place within our cells.

Scientists are only just beginning to investigate how activity in our cells might be affected by exposure to microgravity. Crucially, experiments on embryonic stem cells, and models of how embryos develop in their first few weeks in space, will help us determine whether it's possible for humans to produce offspring in the extraplanetary colonies of the future.