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It’s been 52 years since humans last visited the moon, but that’s about to change.
NASA’s ambitious Artemis program is ready to set a milestone with Artemis II, a mission where four astronauts — Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover — will swing around the moon.
The mission is currently scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 6.
But before the four astronauts can blast off on their historic trip, the rocket and the spacecraft need to go through some checks.
Cue the rollout of the massive 100-metre tall Space Launch System (SLS), scheduled for Saturday.
“These are the kinda days we live for,” said John Honeycutt, Artemis II mission management team chair, during a Friday press conference.
“It really doesn’t get much better than this, and we’re making history.”
SLS and the Orion spacecraft in which the astronauts will live for 10 days have only been launched once, for the uncrewed Artemis I mission around the moon in 2022.
But now, they’re ready for four human passengers.
While the four won’t land on the lunar surface, they will be conducting lunar surveillance, experiments and testing out the spacecraft in preparation for Artemis III — where astronauts will walk on the moon — which is scheduled to launch no earlier than 2028.
Waiting for ‘wet dress’
Saturday’s rollout is schedule for 7 a.m. ET. But don’t expect a race to the pad: it will take anywhere from eight to 12 hours for the five million-kilogram rocket to make the trek.
It will take about an hour for the rocket to even cross the threshold of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director, exploration ground systems, during Friday’s press conference.
The crew access arm — which is where the astronauts will walk and enter the rocket on launch day — will be retracted, which will take roughly 45 minutes.
Then, once the rocket is at the pad, all the connections will be made over the next day or so.
After that, it’s a waiting game for the wet dress rehearsal, where the rocket is loaded up with propellant as if it’s launch day, and the teams go through all the steps preparing for launch. The countdown will stop at T-29 seconds.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen is headed to the moon on the Artemis II mission. He sits down with CBC’s Nicole Mortillaro to talk about the physical, mental and collaborative part of training to go to the farthest place humanity has ever gone.
Wet dresses are essentially practice runs for launch day, so everything needs to go almost perfectly before it’s given the green light for launch.
Artemis I had four wet dress rehearsals over several months before it was cleared to launch.
Asked at the press conference if a Feb. 2 wet dress rehearsal was too close to the Feb. 6 window for an actual launch considering the several attempts with Artemis I, Blackwell-Thompson said “Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot.”
