- Four moon-bound astronauts arrive at the Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad.
- The Artemis II mission could start as soon as 18:24 ET (2224 GMT).
- 10-day test flight an important initial step towards future lunar landings.
NASA is set to launch four astronauts as early as Wednesday evening on a 10-day flight around the moon, marking the most ambitious U.S. space mission in decades and a major step toward returning to the lunar surface before China’s first manned 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 ahead of liftoff, scheduled as early as 10 p.m. 6:24 PM EDT (2224 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Nasa mission managers had asked “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 rolled over Florida’s Space Coast midday, though forecasts remain 80% favorable for launch.
The launch can take place as late as 8.24pm in Wednesday’s two-hour launch window, just a cushion away from where the last moon-bound astronauts of the US Apollo program lifted off more than half a century ago.
The astronauts had arrived in Florida from Houston on Friday. They woke up about nine hours before launch Wednesday for breakfast, a weather briefing and pre-mission preparations, then shared farewell words with family ahead of their 10 a.m. drive. 14 to the launch pad, escorted by armored vehicles.
They have been in a two-week quarantine before flying and spent time with their families over the weekend at the Kennedy Space Center’s beach house, a place where astronauts rest before blasting off into space.
Nasa began filling the SLS core stage Wednesday morning with 733,000 gallons of supercooled propellant that powers the rocket’s four RS-25 engines. The truck-sized pickup 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’s fueling process.
If a last-minute hitch with the rocket appears, or the weather worsens and triggers a crash, Nasa could try to launch again as early as Friday and until April 6, after which it will wait until April 30 for its next opportunity.
“Certainly all indications right now are we’re in excellent, excellent shape when we get into the count,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told reporters on Monday.
The launch was originally scheduled for as early as February 6 and then March 6, until a pesky hydrogen leak prompted Nasa to roll the rocket back to its vehicle building for examination.
The most distant 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 about 252,000 miles (406,000 km) into space — the farthest humans have ever traveled.
The current record for the furthest spaceflight of 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 teardrop-shaped Orion spacecraft on a similar path around the moon and back.
Artemis II will constitute a major test of the Orion and SLS rocket. The 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 function if its automated systems fail.
Lockheed Martin builds Orion, while Boeing and Northrop Grumman have spearheaded the development of SLS since 2010, a program known in part for its ballooning costs at an estimated $2-4 billion per year.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to develop landers that Nasa will use to put its astronauts on the lunar surface.
The Artemis II mission is an important early step in the agency’s multibillion-dollar Artemis program, which envisions a long-term settlement of the moon’s 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 set to be the agency’s first astronaut lunar landing, but new Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman in February added an additional test mission before the landing.
