At the conclusion of a two day flight readiness review today, Dr. Lori Glaze, NASA's Moon to Mars program manager, announced that the Artemis II vehicle has been successfully repaired, and they're planning to roll the vehicle out to the pad as soon as one week from today, April 19th. With the earliest possible launch window in the coming month still as reported before: April 1st at 6:24PM EDT.
"During the flight readiness review, we had extremely thorough discussions — very open, transparent," Lori Glaze, NASA's Exploration Systems Development acting associate administrator, said during a post-FRR press briefing today. It's a short timeline, but NASA officials say they're putting safety first as they work toward their next launch opportunity.
"We talked a lot about our risk posture and how we're mitigating those risks," Glaze said. "We reviewed the challenges that we've had and how we've addressed them, and we talked about the work that remains, what's left to do, and how we're going to get through all of that."
Dr. Glaze spends a few seconds on the launch window availability and points out that even with their calendar of windows we've seen many times, it's not necessarily possible to try on every day that's green, as well as pointing out that in the previous calculations that gave us the "green days," they've missed some times. She added that a recent re-check showed an acceptable launch window on April 2nd.
Artemis 2's mission remains unchanged: fly a single figure-eight loop around the moon and back to Earth. As talked about last Friday, NASA changed the overall Artemis program recently, changing Artemis III from being the first moon landing, currently in 2027, to a mission to test rendezvous and docking between the Artemis/Orion craft and one or both of the human landing systems, SpaceX's HLS or Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2. That pushed the first lunar landing on Artemis IV out to 2028. Artemis V is tentatively scheduled for later in that year.
I think Starship 39 will launch before SLS II. And that naming scheme shows the difference. SpaceX is using Indian numbers (I refuse to call them Arabic numbers because the Arabs stole them from the Indians) and NASA is using Roman numerals.
ReplyDeleteI was hoping they'd get a lick of sense and rework the mission profile of SLS II to be sustained long-term Earth orbit only operations (with a Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 on standby to rescue the astronauts.)