- Four astronauts bound for the Moon arrive at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad.
- The Artemis II mission could take off at 6:24 pm ET (2224 GMT).
- The 10-day test flight is a key initial step toward future moon landings.
NASA will launch four astronauts Wednesday night on a 10-day flight around the Moon, marking the most ambitious American space mission in decades and an important 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 (2224 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA mission managers had voted “go” to launch the Artemis II mission’s towering 322-foot (98 m) Space Launch System rocket, topped with the astronauts’ Orion crew capsule. Clouds spread over Florida’s Space Coast at midday, although weather forecasts remain 80% favorable for launch.
The launch could occur as late as 8:24 p.m. in Wednesday’s two-hour launch window, just one pad away from where the last astronauts of the US Apollo program took off bound for the Moon more than half a century ago.
The astronauts arrived in Florida from Houston on Friday. 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 2 p.m. drive to the launch pad, escorted by armored vehicles.
They have been quarantined for two weeks before liftoff and spent time with their families over the 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 supercooled propellant that powers the rocket’s four RS-25 engines. The truck-sized engines, built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, had powered NASA’s space shuttle for decades.
“Everything is going very well right now,” assistant launch director Jeremy Graeber said of the SLS core stage fueling process.
If a last-minute problem arises with the rocket, or if the weather worsens and causes a plague, NASA could try again to launch it 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 signs are right at the moment, we’re in excellent, excellent shape as we start to count,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told reporters on Monday.
The launch had originally been planned for February 6 and then March 6, until a pesky hydrogen leak forced NASA to take the rocket back to its Vehicle Assembly Building for examination.
The furthest space trip in history
The Artemis II mission will send the crew on a winding nearly 10-day journey around the moon and back, sending them about 252,000 miles (406,000 km) into space — the longest distance humans have ever traveled.
The current record for the furthest space flight, approximately 400,000 kilometers, is held by the three-man crew of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, which was beset 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 gumdrop-shaped Orion spacecraft on a similar path around the Moon and back.
Artemis II will be a major test for Orion and the SLS rocket. Astronauts on board will test critical life support systems, crew interfaces and communications. They will also take manual control of Orion in space about three hours after launch to test its steering and maneuverability, a key feature in case its automated systems fail.
Lockheed Martin is building Orion, while Boeing and Northrop Grumman have led development of SLS since 2010, a program known in part for its ballooning estimated costs of between $2 billion and $4 billion per launch.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to develop the landers that NASA will use to take its astronauts to the lunar surface.
The Artemis II mission is a key first step in the agency’s multibillion-dollar Artemis program that envisions a long-term settlement at the lunar south pole. NASA is pushing hard to land its first crew of astronauts there on the Artemis IV mission by 2028, before China does so around 2030.
Artemis III had been planned to be the agency’s first astronaut landing, but new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in February added an additional test mission before the landing.
