Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen started their pre-flight quarantine on Wednesday evening in Houston. Tonight, the 11-million-pound Space Launch System rocket carrying their Orion spacecraft begins a 4-mile crawl to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center. If everything goes according to plan — and in the Artemis program, that has been a significant “if” — they will launch no earlier than April 1 on a 10-day trip around the Moon and back.

It will be the first time humans have traveled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Fifty-three years.

The Crew That Waited

NASA named these four astronauts to Artemis II back in April 2023. Since then, they’ve watched their launch date slip repeatedly as engineers worked through a cascade of technical problems. Wiseman, a Navy captain who previously served aboard the International Space Station, will command the mission. Glover, also a Navy aviator and ISS veteran, serves as pilot — and becomes the first person of color assigned to a lunar mission. Koch, who holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 328 days, is mission specialist. And Hansen, a Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot, will become both the first Canadian to fly to the Moon and the first to fly in space at all.

They enter quarantine now to minimize illness risk before launch, limiting contact for a week in Houston before traveling to Florida roughly five days before liftoff.

A Long Road to the Pad

The technical obstacles that delayed Artemis II read like an engineering punch list. After the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in late 2022, engineers discovered that chunks of Orion’s Avcoat heat shield had unexpectedly chipped away during reentry. Investigation revealed that gases building up inside the ablative material caused pressure cracks — a serious concern for a spacecraft that would next carry humans.

NASA’s fix was not to rebuild the shield but to modify Artemis II’s reentry trajectory, shortening the flight path between atmosphere entry and splashdown to limit time in the temperature range where the cracking occurred.

Then, after a successful fueling test in February 2026, engineers found a problem with the rocket’s helium system, which regulates fuel tank pressure. Technicians replaced a faulty seal. More recently, an electrical harness on the core stage’s flight termination system needed swapping out. Ground crews completed that work faster than expected, keeping the rollout on track for tonight.

“All the teams polled ‘go’ to launch,” said Lori Glaze of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development, while noting that final checks remain before launch readiness is confirmed.

What Artemis II Will Actually Do

The mission profile is a lunar flyby, not a landing. Orion will orbit Earth twice before its upper stage fires to send the crew on a free-return trajectory — a figure-eight path around the Moon. On flight day six, the spacecraft will pass within roughly 4,000 miles of the far-side lunar surface, farther from Earth than any human has ever been. Four days later, Orion splashes down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego.

The primary objective is proving that Orion’s life-support, navigation, and communication systems work with a crew aboard in deep space. Every system performed on Artemis I will be tested again — this time with four people depending on it.

The Bigger Picture

Artemis II is a stepping stone, not the destination. NASA restructured the broader program in February, scrapping the original plan to land astronauts on the Moon with Artemis III in 2027. Instead, Artemis III will now conduct rendezvous and docking tests in low Earth orbit with SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, along with spacesuit trials. The actual crewed lunar landings have been pushed to 2028, split across Artemis IV and V.

That revised timeline matters because of what’s happening on the other side of the Pacific. China is on track for a crewed lunar landing by 2030, using its Long March 10 rocket and Lanyue lander. Beijing’s program has hit its milestones with a consistency that NASA’s has not, and the narrowing gap has drawn pointed attention from U.S. lawmakers and space officials.

None of that geopolitical weight is on the crew’s shoulders tonight — or at least, it shouldn’t be. What matters in the next two weeks is whether a rocket that has been fixed, patched, requalified, and rolled back and forth across Kennedy Space Center can carry four people safely to the Moon and home again.

The launch window opens April 1 and runs through April 6. The crew will travel to Florida around March 27.

Fifty-three years is a long time to wait. The rocket is finally moving.

Sources