NASA confirmed today that March 6 is their target for sending astronauts around the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years. The date for launching Artemis II is tentative pending a review of data from yesterday’s successful Wet Dress Rehearsal and weather, but that is the plan. The four astronauts are entering the 14-day pre-launch quarantine this afternoon.
Lori Glaze, acting Associate Administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate that oversees the Artemis program, said at a news conference this morning that “it’s really getting real” and time to get excited.
She also was also quick to say the actual date depends on work still to be done and reminded everyone this is a flight test.
“This is our second time to fly the SLS and Orion system, first time with a crew, the first time with environmental control systems active, the first time with the flight termination systems active so that we can support crew. … We’re talking about how confident we are in getting to launch and our excitement about this mission, but I don’t want anybody to ever lose sight of the fact that this is a flight test of the entire mission. We will continue to learn. That’s the whole point of this mission. To learn.” — Lori Glaze
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen will travel around the Moon in their Orion spacecraft after launching from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The 10-day mission will take them around the Moon and back to Earth on a free-return trajectory that will bring them home even if the Orion propulsion system doesn’t operate as expected. They will not orbit or land on the Moon, but will be the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. NASA is hoping to launch the next lunar landing crew, Artemis III, in 2028. An uncrewed flight test, Artemis I, flew in 2022.
Artemis is Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology.
Yesterday’s second Artemis II Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) went off almost without a hitch after NASA and its contractor teams replaced Quick Disconnect seals where liquid hydrogen flows into SLS during fueling. Those seals leaked during the first WDR on February 2-3, exceeding allowable limits and ending the test early. This time the leak rate didn’t rise above 1.6 percent, well below the threshold.
John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II Mission Management Team and previously SLS Program Manager, said the replacement seals aren’t designed differently, they’re just new. The seals are installed into SLS in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) as the various parts of the rocket and spacecraft are integrated together, which takes some time. Then the massively heavy stack — 3.5 million pounds (1.6 million kg) — is rolled out to the launch pad on the Crawler-Transporter. “We understand we have certain loads on the rocket as we roll to the pad,” he said, but “I’m not going to speculate” on whether that’s a factor until teams look over the data to determine if anything needs to be done differently in the future.
Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, who was also Launch Director for Artemis I, said she “felt great” at the end of the WDR. “We had some challenges in Artemis I and as our SLS Chief Engineer and my friend John Blevins often says, you have to earn your right to fly and I felt like last night was a big step in us earning our right to fly.” The process of fueling the rocket and practicing two countdowns went so well that “probably the most exciting thing” was a communications problem that was traced to a network configuration issue. It happened just as they were about to transition from slow-fill to fast-fill of the liquid hydrogen. They switched to a backup system, but she decided to pause fueling anyway until the problem could be resolved.
The crew did not participate in the WDR, but three of them — Wiseman, Koch and Hansen — were in the firing room with Blackwell-Thompson and her team through the day as observers: “I wouldn’t want to put words in their mouth, but I think there were as happy or happier than I was, and I was certainly thrilled with the result.”
The next major milestone is a Flight Readiness Review (FRR). Glaze said the “extensive and detailed” review that will “comb every aspect of this system” is planned for the end of next week. NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya will be there “and I expect our Administrator [Jared Isaacman] will be paying very close attention as well.”
Artemis II is a test flight, as Glaze said, leading to Artemis III that will land U.S. astronauts on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17. Glaze said this morning that NASA won’t choose the crew for Artemis III for a while yet because they need to pick “the right crew for the right mission.” NASA wants to launch them in 2028, but still doesn’t know what Human Landing System (HLS) could be available by then. She also said they are still working on what exactly they want the crew to do while they’re on the surface. NASA’s mission profile requires them to remain on the surface at the lunar South Pole for 6.5 days.
An HLS to get the astronauts from lunar orbit down to and back from the surface isn’t close to being ready. NASA contracted with SpaceX in 2021 to build an HLS version of Starship, but Starship development is well behind schedule. A second contract was awarded to Blue Origin in 2023 for the Blue Moon MK2 HLS, but its first flight isn’t expected until the end of the decade. Glaze pointed out that NASA recently re-opened the HLS contract to “introduce a little bit more of a competitive nature” to accelerate those schedules.
