The rocket is 322 feet tall. It weighs 5.75 million pounds fully fueled. It is standing on Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center, the same concrete platform from which Apollo missions departed for the Moon between 1969 and 1972. On March 20, NASA's crawler-transporter carried the Space Launch System and its Orion spacecraft from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad at a speed of approximately one mile per hour. The journey took ten hours. The destination it is pointed toward is 239,000 miles away. [1]

Artemis II will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in 54 years. The last human beings to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes were the crew of Apollo 17, in December 1972. Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the lunar surface, died in 2017. NASA is holding a live news conference today, March 24, to discuss final pre-launch preparations. The launch window opens as early as April 1 at 6:24 p.m. EDT, with additional opportunities through April 6. [2][5]

The Crew

Four people will ride this machine around the Moon and back.

Commander Reid Wiseman is a Navy test pilot and former International Space Station resident who was selected to lead the mission in April 2023. Pilot Victor Glover, a Navy aviator who served as pilot on SpaceX Crew-1, will become the first Black astronaut to fly beyond low Earth orbit. Mission Specialist Christina Koch holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman — 328 days aboard the ISS in 2019-2020. Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut and former CF-18 fighter pilot, will be the first non-American to fly a lunar mission. [3]

The crew entered pre-flight quarantine on March 18, a standard precaution to prevent illness before launch. They have trained for this mission for nearly three years. The flight itself will last approximately 10 days: four days out, a single pass around the far side of the Moon at an altitude of roughly 6,400 miles, and four days back. They will not land. That is Artemis III, currently planned for 2028 at the earliest. [2]

What the Mission Tests

Artemis II is, in NASA's careful language, a "flight test." The Orion spacecraft has flown once before — Artemis I completed an uncrewed circumlunar mission in November 2022, traveling 1.4 million miles over 25.5 days. That flight validated the spacecraft's heat shield, which must survive reentry at approximately 25,000 miles per hour, and its navigation systems. [1]

What Artemis I could not test is whether the spacecraft's life support, communication, and navigation systems function correctly with four human beings aboard. The environmental control system must regulate oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, and humidity for a crew of four over ten days. The communication system must maintain contact with Mission Control across a distance where signal delay reaches 1.3 seconds. The guidance system must execute a powered flyby maneuver around the Moon with humans making real-time decisions rather than automated sequences. [3]

The Space Launch System itself has performed once, generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust at launch during Artemis I — 15 percent more than the Saturn V that carried Apollo astronauts. The SLS uses a pair of five-segment solid rocket boosters and four RS-25 engines, which are upgraded versions of the Space Shuttle main engines. Each of the four RS-25s on this mission has flown before, on shuttle missions dating back to the 1990s. They have been refurbished, retested, and recertified. [1]

The Race That No One Calls a Race

China's Chang'e program has landed two rovers on the lunar far side and returned samples from the Moon's south pole. The China National Space Administration has announced plans for a crewed lunar landing before 2030. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has repeatedly framed Artemis as a response to Chinese ambitions, telling Congress in 2023 that the United States is "in a space race whether we like it or not." [4]

The framing is politically useful but technically imprecise. China's crewed lunar program is at least four years behind Artemis in announced timelines, though China has met its announced timelines more consistently than NASA in the past decade. Artemis itself has slipped repeatedly — the program was initially targeted for a 2024 crewed landing that is now projected for 2028. The SLS rocket costs approximately $2.2 billion per launch, a figure that has drawn persistent criticism from advocates of commercial alternatives. [4]

None of that will matter on launch day. When the RS-25 engines ignite and the solid boosters fire, the sound will reach the press viewing site three seconds later. The ground will shake. Four people will leave the planet. If everything works — if the engines burn correctly, if the spacecraft separates cleanly, if the trajectory insertion is nominal — they will see the Earth shrink to the size of a marble and the Moon grow from a disc to a world.

The last time that happened, Richard Nixon was president, the Vietnam War was ongoing, and a color television was a luxury item. Fifty-four years is a long time to wait to go back.

-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo