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NASA will roll its Artemis 2 lunar rocket out to the launch pad tonight (March 19) ahead of a planned liftoff on April 1, and you can watch the action live.
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This will be the second deployment of Artemis 2, which will launch four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon.
The first rollout happened on 17 January; two weeks later, the Artemis 2 team conducted a wet dress rehearsal (WDR) and ran the mission’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule through its paces on Pad 39B.
However, a leakage of liquid hydrogen fuel ended the two-day test a little early. Team members fixed the leak on the pad, and replaced some seals in the affected area. They then performed another WDR, which Artemis 2 completed on 19 February.
That success kept the mission on target for one planned launch March 6. But overnight from February 20 to February 21, the Artemis 2 team noticed a new problem: a helium flow interruption in the SLS upper stage.
Mission managers rolled the Artemis 2 stack back to the VAB to deal with that problem and fix it earlier this month. Now everything is ready for a new rollout ahead of a planned launch on 1 April.
There will be fewer hoops to jump through this time: NASA has said it does not plan to conduct another WDR after Artemis 2 returns to the pad.
The Artemis 2 astronauts are NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen from Canadian Space Agency. The quartet will be the first to venture out low earth orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
If Artemis 2 can’t get off the ground on April 1, NASA has other possibilities every day from 2 April to 6 April, as well as 30 April. A new launch window opens in May, but the agency has yet to announce potential dates in that month.
