February 2026 nearly broke the schedule. One day after NASA announced a 6 March target for Artemis II, a crewed flight around the moon, engineers watching overnight caught an interrupted flow of helium inside the Space Launch System rocket’s interim cryogenic propulsion stage. Helium is required for launch, and on February 21 the agency began taking steps to haul the rocket and Orion back into the vehicle assembly building at the Florida spaceport. “This will almost assuredly impact the March launch window,” NASA said.
The March date had come with caveats already. A fueling test had forced a stand-down earlier that month, and hydrogen leaks that first troubled the unpiloted Artemis I flight four years earlier had recurred when the rocket was first fueled for Artemis II in February. Technicians replaced the hydrogen seals, a countdown rehearsal a few weeks later went cleanly, and the schedule held.
Launch day arrives
By April 1 the crew was back at Kennedy for the real thing. The plan called for pumping some 750,000 gallons of super-cold propellant into the 322-foot-tall booster starting around 7 am EDT, with liquid hydrogen chilled toward minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit flowing from about 8:30. The launch window, two hours long, opened at 6:24 pm Eastern, 22:24 UTC, and NASA had six chances through Monday, April 6 before the moon’s position and trajectory limits forced a wait to the end of the month.
The four astronauts would wake around 9:45, suit up in orange pressure suits, ride the Astrovan II motor coach to the pad and take an elevator to the 274-foot level, where a closeout team that included astronauts Jenni Gibbons and Andre Douglas strapped them aboard. Weather looked promising: forecasters gave an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions, with tall cumulus clouds the main worry because a rocket climbing through them can trigger lightning, and a less than 10 percent risk of downrange wind and wave violations along an abort corridor that could stretch from Florida’s Atlantic shore to West Africa.
The flight ahead
The mission profile, as NASA drew it: a nine-day loop around the moon, no landing, passing about 4,700 miles beyond the far side and beyond the distance record Apollo 13 set in 1970. The crew would travel farther from Earth than any humans before them and come home faster, hitting some 25,000 mph at re-entry. Orion, two decades in development, was carrying people for the first time, a test run for Artemis III, the landing attempt scheduled for 2028. NASA flew nine Apollo missions and landed six of them; nobody has been back since 1972, and China now wants its own citizens on the surface by 2030.
Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen knew the day would grind. “It is actually a very long day,” Glover said. “We wake up about eight hours before launch, and there’s a pretty tight schedule of things to get out there.” Koch, a former spacecraft engineer, framed the destination in civic terms: “A destination is not just something we’re looking at,” she said, voicing her “strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the Moon and think of it as also a destination.”
Wiseman, a former Navy test pilot, kept expectations sober. “NASA is ready. This vehicle is definitely ready to go. We went through the flight readiness review. We are ready to launch, but we’re also humans trying to load millions of pounds of propellant onto a giant machine and send it to the Moon.” Delays were part of his math: “So it could very well be that we get on April 1, and we’re behind timeline and we’re just not ready as a team, and then we’ll probably take a 24- or 48-hour pause,” he said.
Sources
- Nasa may roll back Artemis II rocket launch after helium flow discovery | US news | The Guardian
- Launch day has arrived for NASA's Artemis II mission—here's what to expect – Ars Technica
