NASA has raised the tantalizing prospect of launching its Artemis II moon mission several months earlier than expected.
It means that in February — just five months from now — a crew of four astronauts could be launching aboard NASA’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a voyage that no one has taken in five decades.
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NASA had already said that it wanted to launch the mission no later than the end of April 2026, and earlier this year touted the possibility of a February 2026 launch. To space fans’ delight, a top NASA official confirmed on Tuesday that it’s still working toward a launch early next year.
“The agency has made a commitment to launch no later than April 26 and we intend to keep that commitment,” NASA acting deputy administrator Lakiesha Hawkins said at a news conference. “We’re also working to accelerate, as much as we can in terms of the preparations, to potentially as early as February.”
Hawkins added: “The launch window could open as early as February 5, but we want to emphasize that safety is our top priority.”
American astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, together with Canadian Jeremy Hansen, have been training for the highly anticipated mission ever since they were introduced as the crew in April 2023.
The 10-day journey will see the crew will fly around the moon in an Orion spacecraft similar to the one tested in the Artemis I mission in 2022.
Paving the way for a crewed lunar touchdown in the subsequent Artemis III mission, Artemis II will involve the astronauts performing detailed checkouts of Orion’s life support systems. They’ll also conduct proximity and rendezvous demonstrations, and test optical communications technology to and from Earth for high data rate transmissions.
But perhaps most crucially of all, Artemis II will gather data on the effects of deep space travel on humans to prepare for future crewed landings on the moon.
The last time humans flew as far as the moon was in the final Apollo mission in 1972, so there’s much excitement surrounding NASA’s upcoming Artemis II mission.
