NASA on 17–18 January completed a high-profile milestone for its lunar-return programme when the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, together with the Orion crew capsule, was transferred from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. The nearly 12-hour, 6.4-kilometre rollout ended with a banner of signatures from agency staff and contractors draped on the pad’s perimeter—a quiet symbol of institutional momentum after years of delays and scrutiny.
The vehicle destined for the Artemis 2 mission is a towering, heritage-laden machine: 98 metres tall and weighing roughly 2,870 tonnes when fuelled, the SLS uses twin solid-rocket boosters of shuttle lineage and four RS-25 main engines to generate about 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. Orion, perched atop the stack, will carry four crew members—NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—on a roughly ten-day circumnavigation of the Moon.
Artemis 2 is a test flight with a live crew but a conservative profile. The mission will follow a “free-return” trajectory that swings Orion around the Moon and uses gravity to send the spacecraft back to Earth without committing to lunar orbit insertion. Its principal objective is to validate Orion’s life-support systems, crew procedures and integrated operations in the deep-space environment ahead of the programme’s later, lander-carrying missions.
NASA plans a wet dress rehearsal—full propellant loading and countdown practice—on 2 February, with an early launch attempt as soon as 6 February. The agency has scheduled backup windows through 11 February and additional opportunities in March and April. In the coming weeks teams at the pad will perform system integrations, vehicle checkouts and the rehearsals that will determine whether the mission can proceed on schedule.
The Artemis programme’s recent history underlines why those checks matter. Artemis 1, an uncrewed Orion flight launched in November 2022, only reached its launch pad after multiple wet dress rehearsals, hardware returns to the assembly building and repeated delays prompted by cryogenic hydrogen leaks and weather. NASA’s desire to avoid a repeat has intensified scrutiny of SLS hardware and ground operations.
Beyond the immediate test objectives, Artemis 2 carries political and strategic weight. Success would reaffirm NASA’s capability to fly humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time since Apollo, validate a much-criticised heavy-launch architecture and keep on track the timetable that leads to Artemis 3—the mission envisioned to return astronauts to the lunar surface and place the first woman and first person of colour on the Moon. Any significant setback on Artemis 2 would ripple through schedules, budgets and international partnerships that have coalesced around the programme.
The mission also highlights the shifting geopolitics and industrial landscape of lunar exploration. Canada’s involvement—represented by a CSA astronaut aboard Orion—signals allied buy-in, while the United States’ push to re-establish a crewed lunar capability contrasts with rapid Chinese advances in robotic lunar exploration and growing commercial ambitions to build cislunar infrastructure. How NASA manages risk, cost and cadence on Artemis 2 will influence global perceptions of American leadership in deep space.
What to watch next: the wet dress rehearsal and the vehicle’s behaviour during propellant loading; any detection of cryogenic leaks or anomalies tied to the RS-25 engines or the upper-stage propulsion; and the agency’s assessment of Orion’s environmental and life-support performance in transit. Those outcomes will determine whether Artemis 2 becomes the stabilising success the programme needs or another source of delay for a campaign that already faces tight timelines for a lunar landing in the latter half of the decade.