By BlueShift and AFP | 2026-03-31

The crew of NASA's Artemis II moon mission is in position at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida making final preparations for the launch, which is expected to take place as soon as April 1.

NASA has identified potential launch windows every day from April 1 to 6.

The four-member crew -- US astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen -- will be attempting the first crewed moonshot in more than 50 years.

They will fly aboard the Orion spacecraft, perched atop NASA's mammoth new orange-and-white Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS).

"The rocket is ready. We are ready. NASA is ready. This vehicle is definitely ready to go," Wiseman said March 27.

The anticipated launch will be the inaugural crewed flight of the SLS, designed to allow the United States to repeatedly return to the moon in years to come.

The ultimate goal is to establish a permanent lunar base that will offer a staging point for further exploration.

The 10-day journey will take the astronauts on a loop around the moon, though they will not land on its surface.

The Artemis II mission had been due to launch in February, but after NASA detected an issue with helium flow, the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft were rolled back to the Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building.

After completing repairs, NASA on March 19 began returning the 11-million pound Artemis II stack to Launch Pad 39B -- a four-mile (6.5 km), overnight journey that took roughly 11 hours to complete.

NASA had previously identified technical problems including a liquid hydrogen leak that cut short a so-called wet dress rehearsal for the launch.

Glover noted that unpredictability is built into an astronaut's life.

"That's this business. It'll go when the engines light at T-minus zero," he said.

"We still have some weather updates and some technical things to get through between now and when the launch window opens," he added.

Even as the astronauts have faced repeated delays, Glover said, "I'm also impressed by how much learning we still do."

"And I will tell you, the ultimate learning is going to be the mission."

A bigger mission

NASA plans to stream the historic journey, much like the Apollo program -- the US spaceflight effort that landed the first humans on the moon in 1969 -- did with broadcasts around the globe in the 1960s and early 1970s.

While the upcoming journey is historic, Koch said, the crew has kept perspective on their mission's role as a preliminary step towards something bigger.

"We are already ramping up ideas for how we're going to get the next crew trained," she said. "We're in a relay race, and we're not successful until the next missions are successful."

Artemis is the legacy of initiatives launched in the 2000s to succeed the US space shuttles. The second phase follows the Artemis 1 mission in 2022, when an uncrewed spacecraft flew around the moon.

NASA intends to now verify that the Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket are in working order before attempting a lunar landing -- a milestone now scheduled for the Artemis 4 mission in 2028.

Unlike in the Apollo program, NASA this time is collaborating with private industry and with other countries, notably in Europe.

US companies SpaceX and Blue Origin are tasked with developing lunar landers, which the astronauts will require to descend to the moon's surface.

The Artemis program aims to test technologies needed to one day send humans to Mars, a far more distant journey.

"We're going back to the moon because it's the next step in our journey to Mars," said Wiseman said on a NASA podcast.