The countdown for NASA’s Artemis II test flight began Tuesday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the launch team at their consoles inside the Rocco Petrone Launch Control Center readying for a targeted liftoff of 6:24 p.m. EDT. Weather forecasters are reporting an 80% chance of favorable conditions, with primary concerns being cumulus cloud coverage and surface winds.
Aboard the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft are Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch — all NASA astronauts — along with Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. The crew of four will embark on an approximately 10-day free-return trajectory around the moon and back to Earth, covering a distance farther from our planet than any humans have traveled since the final Apollo mission 54 years ago.
The mission carries significant milestone potential. Glover would become the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit. Koch would become the first woman. Hansen would become the first non-U.S. citizen to travel to the vicinity of the moon. And Wiseman, at 49, would become the oldest person to leave low Earth orbit.
Tuesday’s launch attempt is the culmination of a journey that has included multiple delays. An original February launch window was scrubbed after a liquid hydrogen leak was discovered during a wet dress rehearsal on Feb. 2, followed by a valve issue requiring additional attention. A second wet dress rehearsal was completed successfully on Feb. 19, but a helium flow issue observed days later triggered a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building, pushing the mission to April at the earliest. The integrated rocket returned to Launch Pad 39B in late March.
The mission is the second flight of the SLS rocket, which last launched in November 2022 on the uncrewed Artemis I test flight.
The Daily Planet‘s Daniel Sanchez has been covering the human story behind Artemis II through an exclusive five-part interview series with former NASA Flight Director John Curry, number 45 among the elite group of men and women to hold that title. In Part 1, Curry spoke about humanity returning to the moon after 54 years and his personal connection to the Apollo era. In Part 2, he recounted the most harrowing near miss of his career — a 1997 collision between a Russian cargo ship and the Mir space station that nearly killed the crew — and the principles that guide a flight director when everything goes wrong. Part 3 of the series was published this morning.
“The pressure is — crew safety, vehicle safety, mission success. In that order,” Curry told Daily Planet contributor Daniel Sanchez of the flight director’s fundamental charge. “You have to always manage the risk. There’s no such thing as zero risk.”
Orion’s mission profile will carry the crew past the far side of the moon at a distance of approximately 4,700 miles beyond the lunar surface, further than any crewed spacecraft has flown since Apollo 13 in 1970, before executing a high-speed atmospheric reentry at roughly 25,000 miles per hour and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, where the U.S. Navy will recover the crew.
