NASA officials were jittery with excitement as they briefed reporters on the final preparations for Artemis 2 on Friday. This historic mission to slingshot a team of four astronauts around the Moon could lift off in a matter of weeks, and NASA is getting ready to roll the rocket out onto the launchpad.
The agency is targeting no earlier than 7 a.m. ET on Saturday, January 17, to begin rolling the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and stacked Orion spacecraft from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. The four-mile journey should take between 8 and 10 hours.
“About an hour after we get that first motion, you’ll begin to see this beautiful vehicle cross over the threshold of the VAB and come outside for the world to have a look,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, launch director for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program (EGS), said during the briefing.
The agency will begin live coverage of the rollout at 7 a.m. ET, followed by a media event at 9 a.m. ET, when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and the Artemis 2 astronauts will answer questions about their mission preparations. Both events will stream via NASA’s YouTube channel.
The long march to lift-off
After SLS crosses the threshold of the VAB, engineers will pause to retract the mobile launcher’s crew access arm, which should take about 45 minutes, according to Blackwell-Thompson. Then, they will begin rolling the vehicle toward the launch pad at just under 1 mile per hour (1.6 km/hr).
Once the rocket is secured on the pad, engineers will establish connections to ground support equipment, run checks to make sure those connections are working properly, and link the rocket to the launch control center. Teams will also power up all integrated systems for the first time to ensure that flight hardware, the mobile launcher, and ground infrastructure are good to go.
The Artemis 2 crew—consisting of NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—will then conduct a final walkdown of the emergency egress system at the pad. If this all goes according to plan, NASA will get ready for a wet dress rehearsal on February 2.
During this final test, both SLS and Orion will be powered on, and ground crews will load the rocket with propellant. Engineers will then run a launch countdown without firing the rocket’s boosters, instead rehearsing how to safely drain propellant from the SLS.
This process is tricky, and some technical issues are virtually inevitable. NASA is currently targeting a launch date of February 6, but with only a four-day window between the wet dress rehearsal and that earliest possible launch date, this seems unlikely.
“We need to get through wet dress,” Blackwell-Thompson said when asked about the tight turnaround. “We need to see what lessons that we learn as a result of that, and that will ultimately lay out our path toward launch.”
Launch timing remains uncertain
If Artemis 2 isn’t ready to launch by February 6, there are subsequent launch opportunities on February 7, 8, 10, and 11. After that, the next opportunities are March 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11, followed by April 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 30.
If the mission gets pushed back even further than that—which is unlikely, but possible—Blackwell-Thompson said there are additional launch opportunities “in just about every month” after April.
During the briefing, she and her colleagues stressed that NASA’s number one priority is crew safety and said they are not in any rush to get Artemis 2 off the ground. With that said, the agency is under pressure to launch this mission expediently.
As the first crewed mission of NASA’s lunar exploration program, Artemis 2 will serve as a critical stepping stone to the Artemis 3 Moon landing. The U.S. is racing against China to accomplish this feat, and with Artemis 2 already years behind schedule, NASA has been pushing full steam ahead toward a 2026 launch.
But this mission is more than just a test flight. The Artemis 2 astronauts will journey farther into space than any have gone before, observe parts of the Moon no human has ever laid eyes on, and prove that humanity is ready to return to deep space. You won’t want to miss it.
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