Artemis II has a date, a time, and a mission plan

Within the last week or so, there was a flareup of hype about the Artemis II mission.  Part of this is from the emphasis on the moon that has come with President Trump, Sean Duffy as NASA administrator and other changes, but it resulted in solid changes to the Schedule. 

Artemis II, if you're new to it, will be the next flight of an SLS and the Artemis program.  The mission's crew of four will be the first NASA crew to be launched to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. This won't be a mission that lands on the moon; it won't even orbit the moon, unlike Apollo 8  in 1968. It will just loop around the moon and return to Earth without going into orbit around our neighbor. 

Naturally it's early in the sequence of things that need to happen, but the launch is now set for No Earlier Than Thursday February 5, 2026 at 8:09 PM EST, from LC-39B at Kennedy Space Center.  Delays further down the calendar are always possible.  

Artemis II flight plan. Credit: NASA

The crew is Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen, and Payload Specialist Christina Koch.  They come across as rather excited with the coming flight, yet trying to balance the things they're required to do by the mission with the things they need to do.  Like sleep. 

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen put it this way:

"You know me, personally, I hope to take a very short nap on the pad," he said. "There's enough time built in there to have a nap. I’ve been practicing falling asleep. So if the loops are quiet enough, and I get a minute, I’ll try for a nap."
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That Hansen is contemplating a nap on the launch pad of the Artemis II mission underscores just how frenetic the opening day of this mission will be as the astronauts test out the Orion spacecraft to ensure it is indeed ready to fly them to the Moon. It will be a super-busy, high-stress time, during which everything must go right or they'll have to come straight back to Earth. So yes, maybe the crew should grab some sleep when they can.

Hansen also has a different concern he's preparing for.  He's the only one of the four who hasn't been to space before, so he doesn't know if he'll be susceptible to problems getting up and to work.  

Nearly half of all astronauts experience "space adaptation syndrome" during their first flight to orbit, and there is really no way to predict who it will afflict beforehand. This is a real concern for Hansen, a first-time flier, who is expected to hop out of his seat and start working. 

Hansen: I'm definitely worried about that, just from a space motion sickness point of view. So I'll just be really intentional. I won't move my head around a lot. Obviously, I'm gonna have to get up and move. And I'll just be very intentional in those first few hours while I'm moving around. And the other thing that I'll do—it's very different from Space Station—is I just have everything memorized, so I don't have to read the procedure on those first few things. So I'm not constantly going down to the [tablet] and reading, and then up. And I'll just try to minimize what I do.

Hansen and Christina Koch will set up and test essential life support systems on the spacecraft. To put it bluntly, if the bathroom doesn't work, they're not going to the Moon. If the water supply doesn't work, they're not going to the moon. There are more systems we could mention, but you get the picture. 

The big, overriding issue, though, is they're the first people who will fly the Artemis system in space.  Nobody knows what it handles like, nobody knows what it feels like. The only flight of an Artemis craft was unmanned, flown by remote control.  For a few days, they're going to the center of attention for millions, perhaps billions, of people.  Concern about that seems like a pretty normal response. There are more details in the source article.