NASA will roll its Artemis 2 moon rocket out to the launch pad tonight (March 19) ahead of a planned April 1 liftoff, and you can watch the action live.
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This will be the second rollout for Artemis 2, which will launch four astronauts on a 10-day flight around the moon.
The first rollout happened on Jan. 17; two weeks later, the Artemis 2 team conducted a wet dress rehearsal (WDR), running the mission’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew capsule through their paces on Pad 39B.
However, a leak of liquid hydrogen propellant ended that two-day-long test a bit early. Team members fixed the leak on the pad, swapping out some seals in the affected area. They then performed another WDR, which Artemis 2 completed on Feb. 19.
That success kept the mission on target for a planned March 6 launch. But overnight from Feb. 20 to Feb. 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 issue, fixing it earlier this month. Now, everything is set for a second rollout ahead of a planned launch on April 1.
There will be fewer hoops to jump through this time: NASA has said it doesn’t plan to conduct another WDR after Artemis 2 gets back to the pad.
The Artemis 2 astronauts are NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. The quartet will be the first people to venture beyond low Earth orbit since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
If Artemis 2 cannot get off the ground on April 1, NASA has other opportunities each day from April 2 to April 6, as well as on April 30. Another launch window opens in May, but the agency has not yet announced potential dates in that month.