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NASA will give an update about its Artemis 2 moon launch plans today (March 12), and you can watch it live.
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Artemis 2 will send four astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen — on a 10-day trip around the moon and back home again. It will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
NASA had hoped to launch Artemis 2 last month, and seemed on track to do so after successfully completing a fueling test on KSC’s Pad 39B in late February.
Just after that test, however, a problem popped up — an interruption in the flow of helium in the upper stage of Artemis 2’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. So the mission team rolled the Artemis 2 stack off Pad 39B and back to KSC’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) for repairs.
Last week, NASA announced that this work was going well, potentially keeping Artemis 2 on track for launch in the next available window, which opens on April 1.
We’ll learn more during today’s update, which will come after completion of the Artemis 2 flight readiness review. Participants in the briefing are:
- Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate
- John Honeycutt, chair, Artemis 2 Mission Management Team
- Shawn Quinn, manager, Exploration Ground Systems Program
- Norm Knight, director, Flight Operations Directorate
