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Artemis II rocket to the moon could finally launch this week

The astronauts set to become the first lunar visitors in more than half a century arrived at their launch site Friday, joining the towering rocket that stands poised to blast off this week and send them around the moon.

NASA is aiming for liftoff as soon as Wednesday. The space agency has the first six days of April to launch the Space Rocket System rocket before standing down for nearly a month.

Wiseman stressed there’s no guarantee they will launch in early April as planned, and that it could slip to May or even June. The Space Launch System rocket has soared only once before; the crew-less test flight to the moon was back in 2022.

The Orion capsule atop the rocket will carry the four on NASA’s first astronaut moonshot since Apollo 17 in 1972. The 10-day flight will end with a Pacific splashdown.

Fuel leaks and other rocket issues caused two months of delay and double hangar-to-pad rollouts.

Last week, the space agency outlined a fresh plan for the moon base that NASA intends to build under the Artemis program. The upcoming moonshot will be followed in 2027 by a lunar lander demo in orbit around Earth and in 2028 by one and possibly two lunar landings by astronauts.

The Artemis missions will inevitably be compared to the Apollo project of the 1960s and 70s. The world’s first lunar visitors orbited the moon on Apollo 8 in 1968. The Artemis II crew will play it safe and zip around the moon in an out-and-back slingshot.

During next year’s revamped Artemis III, astronauts will stick closer to home the same way Apollo 9 did in 1969. Instead of attempting a moon landing as originally envisioned, they will practice docking their Orion capsule in orbit around Earth with one or both lunar landers under development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. The rival companies are accelerating work on their landers in a bid to be first.

The Soviets were America’s fierce rivals during Apollo, but their moon rockets kept exploding at liftoff and they eventually gave up. Now the Chinese are the competition.

China already has landed robotic spacecraft on the moon’s far side — the only nation to achieve that — and is scrambling to land astronauts near the lunar south pole by 2030.

NASA is aiming for the same polar region, where shadowed craters are thought to hold vast amounts of ice that could provide drinking water and rocket fuel. Like his predecessor Bill Nelson, Isaacman is determined to beat China to the finish line and win this second space race.


(AP Photo John Raoux)
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