After fixes, NASA targets April 1 for Artemis II lunar mission

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Mar 12, 2026

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NASA plans to roll back to the pad as early as next week for the Artemis II mission to fly crew around the moon, which could set up a shot to launch as soon as April 1.

“All the teams polled ‘Go’ to launch and fly Artemis II around the moon, pending completion of some of the work before we roll out to the launch pad,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development, during a press conference from Kennedy Space Center following the mission’s flight readiness review (FRR).

The 322-foot-tall Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft could be rolling from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) back to the pad as soon Thursday, Glaze said, which means launch could during the first opportunity in April if all goes well.

“While I am comfortable and the agency is comfortable with targeting April 1 as our first opportunity, just keep in mind we still have work to do,” Glaze said. “There are still things that need to be done within the VAB and out at the pad, and as always, we’ll always be guided by what the hardware is telling us. We will launch when we’re ready. ”

John Honeycutt, the chair of the Artemis II Mission Management Team, said teams during the FRR were in agreement moving forward with the roll and launch.

“We’ve got a path to close all the open actions, either prior to rollout or prior to launch,” he said.

This would be the rocket’s second trip to the pad, having rolled out in January. Launch teams shot for, but ultimately missed, opportunities in February and March.

Despite working through a successful wet dress rehearsal, a helium flow issue in the upper stage of the rocket — inaccessible at the pad — forced NASA to roll the rocket back to Vehicle Assembly Building, where it has been parked for the last three weeks.

Standing by are the four men and women set to become the first humans to fly to the vicinity of the moon since the final Apollo program mission in 1972.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, could be heading back into a two-week quarantine by the middle of next week that could allow for their first launch opportunity on April 1. Backup launch dates fall between April 2-6. If NASA can’t launch by then, the crew wouldn’t get another shot until April 30.

The four had already twice entered quarantine ahead of two previous launch windows, but problems with cryogenic liquid hydrogen leaks on the SLS core stage during a first wet dress rehearsal took a February window off the board, and the helium flow in the upper stage that forced the rollback nixed the March window.

When they finally do get off the pad, the mission will be the first crewed flight of Orion.

Uncrewed versions of Orion flew on a two-orbit test flight, Exploration Flight Test-1, in 2014, and then on the 25-day lunar orbital Artemis I mission in November 2022. That flight was considered mostly a success, except for damage found on the spacecraft’s heat shield, which pushed the time between missions from what had been an original turnaround target of 2 years to now nearly 3 1/2 years between missions.

For Artemis II, its crew look to fly a 10-day mission that will only go around, and not land on, the moon. The goal is to prove Orion can keep crew safe for future missions to the moon’s surface, although a recent shakeup in the Artemis plan spearheaded by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has delayed that until the fourth Artemis mission.

Instead, Artemis III is targeting a mid-2027 launch to low-Earth orbit, with a goal of flying a crew to meet up and test out the ability of Orion to dock with one or both of NASA’s two contracted human landing systems — SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, which remain in development.

Artemis IV, targeting early 2028, would then be the mission to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 55 years, using whichever of the two landers is ready.

Isaacman’s shakeup was designed to get a higher launch rate for the SLS rocket, which was facing at least a three-year delay between Artemis II and III. Now, the goal is to launch as quickly as every 10 months, with a potential Artemis V mission flying by late 2025.

With faster mission turnaround, and the cancellation of more complicated versions of SLS in favor of a more standardized architecture, Isaacman hopes to make the missions safer and reduce costs to a program that has cost taxpayers more than $100 billion since development began in earnest in 2012.

“This is the first flight of humans in over 50 years to the moon, and that’s certainly exciting,” Honeycutt said. “We’re not going to celebrate this small victory that we had on getting through the FRR, which was quite a big deal, but it’s just a step along the way. We’re not going to celebrate till we get Reid and Victor and Christina and Jeremy safely home.”

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