- Four astronauts on their way to the moon arrive at the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center.
- The Artemis II mission could take off as early as 6:24 p.m. ET (10:24 p.m. GMT).
- A 10-day test flight is a key first step toward future moon landings.
NASA is set to launch four astronauts as early as Wednesday evening for a 10-day flight around the Moon, marking the most ambitious US space mission in decades and a major step toward returning humans to the lunar surface before China’s first crewed landing.
The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen donned their flight suits and arrived at the launch pad before liftoff, scheduled for 6:24 p.m. EDT (10:24 p.m. GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA mission managers had asked “go ahead” to launch the Artemis II mission’s massive 98 m (322 ft) Space Launch System rocket, topped by the astronauts’ Orion crew capsule. Clouds fell over Florida’s Space Coast at midday, although the weather forecast remains 80% favorable for launch.
The launch could take place as late as 8:24 p.m. in Wednesday’s two-hour launch window, just one distance from where the last astronauts in the U.S. Apollo program took off more than half a century ago.
The astronauts arrived in Florida on Friday from Houston. They woke up Wednesday about nine hours before launch for breakfast, a weather briefing and pre-mission preparations, then shared farewell words with family before their 14-hour drive to the launch pad, escorted by armored vehicles.
They were quarantined for two weeks before liftoff and spent time with their families this weekend at the Kennedy Space Center beach house, a place where astronauts rest before blasting off into space.
On Wednesday morning, NASA began filling the SLS core stage with 733,000 gallons of super-cooled propellant that powers the rocket’s four RS-25 engines. The van-sized engines, built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, had powered NASA’s space shuttle for decades.
“Everything is going very well right now,” Jeremy Graeber, deputy launch director, said of the process of refueling the SLS core stage.
If a last-minute problem with the rocket arises, or if the weather deteriorates and triggers a scrub, NASA could attempt to launch the rocket again as early as Friday and as late as April 6, after which it would wait until April 30 for its next opportunity.
“Certainly, all the indications are there, we’re in excellent, excellent shape as we start counting down,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told reporters on Monday.
The launch was originally scheduled for February 6, then March 6, until a pesky hydrogen leak prompted NASA to take the rocket back to its Vehicle Assembly Building for scrutiny.
The farthest space journey in history
The Artemis II mission will send the crew on a winding, nearly 10-day journey around the Moon and back, sending them some 252,000 miles (406,000 km) into space – the furthest humans have ever traveled.
The current record for longest spaceflight, about 248,000 miles, is held by the three-man crew of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, which was plagued by technical problems after an oxygen tank exploded and was unable to land on the moon as planned.
Humans have not left Earth’s orbit since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
NASA launched its first uncrewed Artemis mission in 2022, sending the gumball-shaped Orion spacecraft on a similar path around the Moon and back.
Artemis II will be a more thorough test of Orion and the SLS rocket. Astronauts on board will test essential life support systems, crew interfaces and communications. They will also take manual control of Orion into space about three hours after launch to test its steering and maneuverability, a key feature in the event its automated systems fail.
Lockheed Martin builds Orion, while Boeing and Northrop Grumman have led development of SLS since 2010, a program partly known for its exorbitant costs, estimated at $2 billion to $4 billion per launch.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are competing to develop the landers that NASA will use to send its astronauts to the lunar surface.
The Artemis II mission is a key first step in the agency’s multibillion-dollar Artemis program, which envisions a long-term facility on the lunar south pole. NASA is doing everything it can to land its first crew of astronauts there as part of the Artemis IV mission by 2028, before China does so around 2030.
Artemis III was supposed to be the agency’s first astronaut to land on the Moon, but new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in February added an additional test mission before landing.
