NASA's Artemis 2 moon rocket arrives back at the launch pad
NASA's Artemis II Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft began rolling from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center at 12:20 a.m. EDT on Friday, March 20, after high winds delayed the start of the operation earlier in the morning. The journey takes up to 12 hours, the stack riding crawler-transporter 2 at walking pace along the 4-mile crawlerway — slow enough that NASA streams it live and people drive down to Florida's Space Coast to watch.
This is the rocket's second trip to the pad. The first ended in the VAB. On February 21, during wet dress rehearsal, teams observed a helium flow issue that prevented helium from reaching the upper stage. The rocket rolled back to the VAB on February 25. Engineers repaired the issue and refreshed several systems — new flight termination system batteries on all stages, replaced batteries on the upper stage, core stage, and solid rocket boosters, recharged Orion's launch abort system batteries, and replaced a seal on the core stage liquid oxygen feed line. Then they found an electrical harness on the flight termination system of the core stage that needed replacement. That pushed rollout from the originally planned March 19 to Friday, March 20. Both issues are now resolved.
The crew entered quarantine Wednesday, March 18, at Johnson Space Center in Houston: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They fly to Kennedy roughly five days before launch.
The launch window opens Wednesday, April 1, at 6:24 p.m. EDT (22:24 UTC), with opportunities continuing through April 6 and a backup date of April 30. The mission is designed to last approximately ten days — a free-return trajectory around the Moon and back, no landing. It is the first crewed lunar trajectory since Apollo 17 in 1972.
That is the headline and it is not nothing. Fifty-four years between crewed lunar missions is a long time for an institution that built its identity around getting people off the ground. But the more important number is the one nobody is talking about: one. SLS has carried one crew-capable payload and that was this stack on the pad in January. The ground processing tempo is the quiet variable the whole program is trying to solve.
Jared Isaacman, the Trump-appointed NASA administrator who cleared Senate confirmation in December 2025, is expected to make exactly this argument publicly. Fly more often or lose the institutional skill to fly at all. Artemis II is the first data point in that argument. The hardware has heritage — RS-25 engines from the shuttle program, solid boosters based on shuttle technology, a core stage design that traces to the cancelled Ares rocket. That heritage means the systems are well-understood. The risk is not in the design. It is in how often the teams get to practice.
The April 1 window is an engineering constraint, not a soft target. Lunar launch windows are determined by orbital mechanics — the relative positions of Earth and Moon that allow a free-return trajectory with enough propellant margin to get home. If Artemis II slips past April 6 due to weather or a technical issue during final checkout, the next opportunity is April 30, a gap of three weeks. That matters because every extra day in the processing flow is a day of exposure to something going wrong.
As of Friday morning, the stack is moving. Live rollout coverage is on NASA's YouTube channel.
Primary source: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2026/03/20/artemis-ii-moon-rocket-heads-back-to-launch-pad/