After moving off an early February launch window for Artemis II—a four-person sojourn around the moon and back—NASA on Friday said it hopes to launch the mission on March 6.
Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said that a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) for Artemis II “went very, very smoothly”—smooth enough that it could launch within two weeks.
Glaze said engineers are reviewing data from the WDR to make a final determination. The prelaunch exercise is designed to rehearse fueling the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket—the vehicle that will launch NASA’s Orion crew capsule on the 10-day mission—and practice strapping the astronauts into their seats.
“There is still pending work,” Glaze said. “We do have some significant work to be completed out at the pad…And we also have a multiday flight readiness review that will come up later next week. And so those things are all in front of us. We need to successfully navigate all of those.”
But “assuming that happens,” Glaze said, “it puts us in a very good position to target March 6.”
The Artemis II crewmembers—NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen—entered quarantine on Friday, signaling that NASA is preparing to launch the mission in as little as 14 days. There will be further launch opportunities on March 7, 8, 9, and 11 should a March 6 attempt be scrubbed.
The mission could slide to the following month if engineers determine SLS or Orion are not fit to fly, with additional chances on April 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Artemis Has Arrived
Artemis II has been highly anticipated in the three-plus years since the uncrewed Artemis I mission.
The mission will mark SLS and Orion’s first integrated operations with human occupants. It aims to validate that vehicle systems perform as expected in a real deep space environment ahead of Artemis III, which will land a crew of four at the lunar south pole. The Artemis II crew will conduct evaluations and practice maneuvers considered critical for that landing.
After the crew completes a few orbits around Earth, a trans-lunar injection burn will place Orion on a figure eight-shaped trajectory that at its apex extends more than 230,000 miles from the Blue Planet. On its way back, the spacecraft will rely on Earth’s gravity to pull it home naturally rather than expending additional propulsion.
NASA conducted an initial WDR for Artemis II earlier in February, encountering “several challenges” that prompted it to require a second.
Engineers repaired seals at the quick disconnect interface of the tail service mast umbilical, which is used to load the SLS core stage with propellant. During the first test run, a liquid hydrogen leak near the interface “spiked” at about T-5:15 in the mock countdown, prompting a ground launch sequencer to automatically halt it. NASA encountered a similar issue in the leadup to Artemis I.
Teams also replaced some filters in the ground systems occupying Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“I can say for the most part those fixes all performed pretty well [Friday],” said Glaze.
Engineers loaded the SLS’ tanks with more than 700,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant, which Glaze said was completed on schedule. This time around, hydrogen gas concentrations “remained under allowable limits,” NASA said.
The space agency also hit its timeline for a closeout crew to practice securing the astronauts in Orion. NASA likens the five-person team to an auto racing pit crew. On launch day, the closeout process is expected to take about four hours. Personnel will need to strap the astronauts into the capsule and connect them to life support, communications, and environmental control systems before closing the hatch.
The WDR was not without hiccups. A loss of ground communications early in the mock countdown forced teams to switch to backup channels. But engineers quickly found the root cause, restoring them in about 30 minutes. Ground communications systems experienced multiple “dropouts” during the countdown earlier this month.
Teams this week completed two runs of the terminal count procedure, which is designed to confirm that all systems perform as expected under launch conditions. The first was briefly paused due to a “booster avionics system voltage anomaly.”
However, NASA is projecting confidence in the March 6 launch target. Further analysis of this week’s WDR will guide the space agency’s decision on how to proceed.
The Artemis program’s human space exploration goals are broadly supported by the space industry and federal government. But SLS and Orion have plenty of critics due to their cost. Estimates vary, but many assess it costs more than $4 billion to launch the integrated system just once.
NASA has already spent tens of billions of dollars on the project and is expected to spend billions more before returning astronauts to the moon on Artemis III.
