Yesterday, Jan. 17, the Artemis II hardware was rolled to launch pad 39B of the Kennedy Space Center side of the Cape. Breaking Space (NASA Spaceflight's) video here, but let me caution that it doesn't show the whole move and doesn't show the final position.
The thing that's most important here is that preparations for the Artemis II mission have stepped to the next level. There will be tests performed out on the pad that can't be done in the more restrictive environments that they've been working in up to now. For the crews that work well away from the headlines and get things done, it's exciting.
“These are the kinds of days that we live for when you do the kind of work that we do,” said John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Mission Management Team for the Artemis II mission. “The rocket and the spacecraft, Orion Integrity, are getting ready to roll to the pad … It really doesn’t get much better than this, and we’re making history.”
A topic that doesn't get talked about widely is that the farther they advance toward the scheduled February 6th launch, a mindset called "launch fever" begins to affect the entire chain of command. Although the phrase isn't widely used, it doesn't take much reading of the fatal accidents in the past to encounter talk about it without using those two words. Shuttles Challenger, and Columbia as well as the Apollo 1 fire during a test on the pad - anything that resulted in the loss of vehicle and crew.
Artemis I back in November of '22 was an unmanned mission, so vitally important systems like the crew compartment's air system, weren't flight tested. I've read that before they leave for their translunar injection that this will be fully tested while in Earth orbit. NASA named the program Artemis back in 2019, but pieces have been around for 20 years.
NASA selected Orion contractor Lockheed Martin to oversee the development of a deep space capsule in 2006 as part of the George W. Bush administration’s soon-to-be canceled Constellation program. In 2011, a political bargain between the Obama administration and Congress revived the Orion program and kicked off development of the Space Launch System. The announcement of the Artemis program in 2019 leaned on work already underway on Orion and the SLS rocket as the centerpieces of an architecture to return US astronauts to the Moon.
The Orion capsule flew on a test flight called ARES 1-X on October 28, 2009, a decade before the Artemis name was chosen. There are good photos available at that Wikipedia link.
There's still much to be done before launch, and much to be implemented from Artemis I. They had lots of trouble with the liquid hydrogen fuel that the SLS uses.
Assuming the countdown rehearsal goes according to plan, NASA could be in a position to launch the Artemis II mission as soon as February 6. But the schedule for February 6 is tight, with no margin for error. Officials typically have about five days per month when they can launch Artemis II, when the Moon is in the right position relative to Earth, and the Orion spacecraft can follow the proper trajectory toward reentry and splashdown to limit stress on the capsule’s heat shield.
In February, the available launch dates are February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11, with launch windows in the overnight hours in Florida. If the mission isn’t off the ground by February 11, NASA will have to stand down until a new series of launch opportunities beginning March 6. The space agency has posted a document showing all available launch dates and times through the end of April.
The guy in the hot seat for this mission is John Honeycutt mentioned in that first indented quote above.
One of Honeycutt’s jobs as chair of the Mission Management Team (MMT) is ensuring all the Is are dotted and Ts are crossed amid the frenzy of final launch preparations. While the hardware for Artemis II is on the move in Florida, the astronauts and flight controllers are wrapping up their final training and simulations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I think I’ve got a good eye for launch fever,” he said Friday.
“As chair of the MMT, I’ve got one job, and it’s the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. I consider that a duty and a trust, and it’s one I intend to see through.”
NASA’s 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on the eve of rollout to Launch Complex 39B. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
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