Everything ready for the launch of Artemis II, the return of humans to lunar orbit

The countdown officially began on Monday, and the US space agency said it generally has no concerns about the mission.

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The SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and the Orion spacecraft are already located on the launch pad awaiting takeoff time, scheduled for Wednesday at 6:24 p.m. local time (22:24 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center (Florida, United States).

The Artemis II countdown was launched on Monday with an 80% chance of good weather, although NASA identified the possibility of strong winds and a cloudy sky as the main risks.

Although South Florida has experienced rain in recent days, weather forecasts at Cape Canaveral, where NASA has its facilities in the state, predict only a 20% chance of precipitation on takeoff day.

In case the takeoff does not occur tomorrow, NASA has prepared alternative windows until April 6. If all opportunities are exhausted, the next one would be April 30.

A journey to offer answers

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are the protagonists of this mission, which aspires to become the first to travel to the orbit of the natural satellite since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The four, who have accumulated 661 days in space, left their quarantine last Friday, and over the weekend they offered their last press conference before the trip to the Moon.

“We have the opportunity to answer the question that could be the question of our lives, which is: Are we alone? When we go out and meet people people ask all the time: Have you seen evidence of this? What can we learn? And the fact is, answering this question begins on the Moon,” said Koch, who will become the first woman to reach lunar orbit.

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Artemis II will last “ten days” and is expected to be the manned mission that moves furthest from Earth, exceeding the 400,000 kilometers that Apollo 13 distanced itself from our planet. Thanks to this, its crew will be the first humans to see the far side of the Moon.

In addition, the mission will inaugurate a more representative era of exploration, by transferring a woman, a black astronaut and a Canadian to the Earth satellite for the first time.

The April window is the third for its launch, after those in February and March were discarded due to a fuel leak detected during the cold test and due to problems in the ship’s helium supply when it was already on the launch pad, which caused the rocket and capsule to be disassembled.

The beginning of the jump to the Moon

This is the second Artemis mission after the unmanned flight in 2022, and precedes the following ones, in which astronauts will set foot on lunar soil again in 2028 and will begin establishing a permanent presence on the natural satellite.

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Originally, the program also provided for the construction of the Gateway orbital station, but NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced last week that they are pausing this project.

This federal agency indicated that the objective will be lunar deployment in phases, an ambitious $20 billion plan that plans to culminate with three permanent habitats on the Moon, several rovers, a nuclear fission reactor and facilities to process lunar material, obtain energy and raw materials to sustain a permanent colony.

The United States authorities have openly acknowledged that they compete with China in a space race to reach the lunar surface first, while Beijing has set the goal of sending astronauts to the Moon before 2030.