Leaders and crew members of the lunar Artemis II mission unanimously agreed to move forward with the mission after a routine flight readiness review and are now aiming for a launch on April 1.
The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft are still in NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, after technical issues forced the mission to be delayed. Lori Glaze, one of the mission's leaders, said in a press conference on Thursday the administration is planning to roll Artemis II back to the launch pad on March 19.
"It's a test flight, and it is not without risk," Glaze said, "but our team and our hardware are ready."
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Artemis II is NASA's first return to the moon in more than 50 years. The mission will take four astronauts on a ten-day mission, going further than humans have ever gone, circling the moon once before returning to Earth.
The four-person crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — all participated in the flight readiness review remotely from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Glaze said on Thursday.
In Thursday's press conference, Artemis II leaders said their readiness review focused largely on the safety of the crew. Now moving forward with an April 1 launch, the crew is expected to enter quarantine in Houston around March 18 and fly to Cape Canaveral, Florida around March 27.
During the flight readiness review, John Honeycutt, the Artemis II Mission Management Team chair, said that NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya asked if there were any concerns or disagreements about Artemis II's preparedness.
"We spent a little bit of quiet time, giving people plenty of time to come to the table and share any dissenting concerns, and there were none," he said.
Last month, NASA conducted a successful dress rehearsal for Artemis II. Hours after declaring the rehearsal a success, engineers found a helium leak in one of the rockets, requiring the vehicle to be moved back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, significantly delaying the mission.
Soon thereafter, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a significant rework of the Artemis Program, saying that the amount of time between missions needed to be markedly reduced. As such, a new mission was added for next year — now Artemis III — which will involve testing equipment in low Earth orbit to prepare for a lunar landing. Artemis IV, estimated for 2028, will be the first crewed landing on the moon since the Apollo missions.
Artemis II leaders said they do not plan to conduct another dress rehearsal, following the previous test. It’s a vote of confidence in the equipment on Artemis II, both that were already on the vehicle and that have since been added in the Vehicle Assembly Building.
"The next time we tank the vehicle will be when we're attempting to launch," Glaze said.
Honeycutt said that the gap between Artemis I, in 2022, and this year's Artemis II mission significantly adds to the risk factor for something to go wrong.
"We're probably not one-in-fifty on the mission going exactly like we want to, but we're probably not one-in-two like we were on the first flight," Honeycutt said. "I think we're being really careful not to lay probabilistic numbers on the table for this mission, just given the small amount of data."
Glaze noted that the mission, its success, and whether or not there are errors in flight are not determined by a single statistic, but agreed that not being in a regular routine of launches adds to the risk. Honeycutt later clarified his remark and said that the mission was not as risky as the flip of a coin.
"I don't want you walking out of here saying that this mission is a one-in-two," Honeycutt said. "I'm saying, if you look at the data over time of the lifespan of just building new rockets, the data would show you that one out of two is successful; you're only successful 50% of the time. I think we're in a much better position than that."
NASA had identified several windows of opportunity to launch Artemis II, stretching from February through April. Since delaying the mission, NASA has not publicly shared any launch windows beyond April. Glaze said the administration does have other opportunities, but that they are "solely focused on April."
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