NASA officials wrapped up their Artemis II Flight Readiness Review on Wednesday, with every team across the program voting to proceed with the mission. This was the final bureaucratic major hurdle before four astronauts attempt to fly around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The two-day review, conducted here at Kennedy Space Center, assessed the readiness of the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion spacecraft, the ground systems, and the flight control and crew teams. It concluded with no dissenting opinions and a clear path to launch.

“At the conclusion of the FRR, all teams polled ‘go’ to launch and fly Artemis II around the moon, pending completion of some remaining work before rollout,” said Dr. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. “This is a test flight, and it is not without risk, but our team and our hardware are ready.”

SLS’s Return To LC-39B

NASA is targeting rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building on Thursday, March 19.

If the date holds and the SLS stack leaves the VAB on schedule next week, the 22-day turnaround from rollback to rollout will be the fastest so far for the Artemis program. The vehicle came off the pad on February 26 after engineers discovered interrupted helium flow in the upper stage during overnight data review. That bad news can just after a second wet dress rehearsal that had otherwise gone well enough that a March launch appeared within reach for NASA.

When asked whether there are plans beyond April if those windows are missed, Glaze was brief: “Right now, we are solely focused on April.”

Status Of Repairs

Once Artemis II was back in the VAB, teams removed the suspect helium quick disconnect from the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS), took it to the lab and inspected it closely. They found a seal blocking the flow path through the fitting. Engineers reproduced the failure on test hardware, developed a fix, and qualified it for flight. The modified quick disconnect is already installed on the vehicle and is ready to go.

Sean Quinn, Exploration Ground Systems program manager said that processing in the VAB has gone well with the overall team is actually running slightly ahead of schedule. Remaining tasks centered on completing flight termination system checkouts and preparing the vehicle for rollout.

Quinn confirmed that the next time SLS is fully tanked, it will be for a live launch attempt: “We believe the seals we now have are the best we have seen on SLS, and there is not much more to be gained from another standalone tanking event.”

Flight Readiness Review

Mission Management Team Chair John Honeycutt said the FRR process was thorough and transparent, with no dissenting opinions raised. He described the review as a careful accounting of what could go wrong and how those risks are being managed, adding that the two day review was no celebration.

Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, joined the Flight Readiness Review virtually from Houston, a notable inclusion in a process that typically unfolds at the program level without the crew present. Dr. Lori Glaze said they opened the review with their own remarks, describing the risks that matter most to them personally: heat shield performance and entry interface accuracy, communications, environmental control and life support, and electrical power.

“One point they made very clearly is that this mission is different from the missions we have been doing in low-Earth orbit for the last 25 years,” Glaze said. “We are going well beyond low-Earth orbit, and we cannot assume that LEO experience maps cleanly onto a lunar mission.”

April Launch Windows

NASA released an updated launch window chart today, adding April 2nd at 7:22 pm EDT as a new date and time.

NASA sounds quite confident, and weather permitting, it sounds like Artemis II will fly in early April.