NASA have made new announcements about major milestones achieved for the Artemis II rocket, with a planned liftoff on April 1, 2026. Very early on March 20, the complete Artemis vehicle, consisting of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft, executed a successful rollout to the launch pad after substantial repairs were made to the helium check valves within the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS).
Further, the official crew members assigned to Artemis II (NASA Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen) entered health quarantine at Johnson Space Centre in Houston on March 18. Crews are generally placed in pre-flight health quarantine to ensure all astronauts are healthy for their upcoming 10-day mission around the Moon, which represents humanity’s first voyage back to deep space in over 50 years.
SLS rocket reaches the pad
According to NASA, a 322-foot (98-meter) tall rocket stacked with an Orion crew vehicle began its first motion out of the Vehicle Assembly Building at 12:20 a.m. EDT and achieved ‘hard down’ on the pad approximately 10 hours later. EDT on March 20, 2026, after being transported via crawler transporter 2 at a maximum speed of 1 mile per hour. The entire stack weighed 11 million pounds (4.9 million kilograms) and took about 10 hours to reach launch pad 39B.
The rollout was made possible after successfully addressing a helium flow problem with the upper stage of the rocket, as well as replacing some of the flight batteries on the rocket with new units. This will enable the rocket to be at peak performance on launch day for the upcoming April 2026 launch.
Crew sent for quarantine
The four-person crew consisting of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen officially entered the flight crew health stabilisation (quarantine) period on Wednesday, March 18, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. EDT. The quarantine is necessary to help prevent any crew member from bringing an illness into space.
The crew members are currently isolating at Johnson Space Centre (JSC) in Houston, Texas and will travel to Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) for the final portion of their quarantine approximately five days prior to launch. The crew member’s final quarantine will take place in the traditional crew quarters at KSC.
Mission objectives: Testing deep space survival
The purpose of Artemis II is to perform a ten-day crewed flyby mission around the Moon, and it will be used to test crew health and performance on the Orion spacecraft under real metabolic loads for the first time. The mission will take place using a hybrid free-return trajectory, which allows the spacecraft to loop around the far side of the Moon and use the Moon’s gravitational pull to return to Earth for landing.
Another important aspect of this flight is that during the mission, the crew will have the opportunity to test out the new optical laser communication system, which utilises lasers to send high-definition data from the space vehicle to Earth at rates of up to 260 megabits per second. This will provide an important enhancement for future Mars missions.
Target launch date
NASA has formally established April 1st, 2026, as the target launch date after successfully rolling out the Artemis II flight hardware and getting a ‘Go’ from the Flight Readiness Review that took place on March 12. There are multiple opportunities for backup launches through the month of April. If successful, this will be the 1st time in 53 years that humans have flown outside of LEO, and the 4 crew members involved in this mission will become the 25th-28th individuals to have travelled into the vicinity of the Moon.
