La NASA anuncia la cobertura de la de la primera misión tripulada Artemis alrededor de la Luna

Artemis II is five days from launch. It will send four astronauts around the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 left lunar orbit in December 1972. That is a real milestone. It is also a mission that accumulated 17 months of delays in a 12-month period, survived a heat shield investigation that took most of 2025, and rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building in February because of a helium flow anomaly. The gap between the headline and the hardware is the story.

NASA confirmed launch is targeted for no earlier than 6:24 p.m. EDT on April 1, with a two-hour window. Additional launch opportunities are available April 6 and April 30 if needed. The approximately 10-day mission will send Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency on a free-return trajectory around the Moon — looping around the far side without entering lunar orbit and returning without an engine burn, a profile comparable to Apollo 13 in 1970 rather than Apollo 8. It is a conservative first step, by design. The Space Launch System rocket that will launch them has never flown crew before; the Orion spacecraft carrying them has flown once, uncrewed, on Artemis I in 2022.

That uncrewed flight is where the heat shield problem originated. When Orion returned from Artemis I, engineers found unexpected char erosion on the Avcoat heat shield — material ablating unevenly and in larger quantities than models predicted. NASA spent the better part of 2025 investigating. The agency ultimately determined the heat shield would perform within acceptable bounds for Artemis II, but the months-long analysis added to a delay stack that already included life support system issues and the February rollback. The February anomaly — a helium flow valve issue that triggered an automated safety hold during a wet dress rehearsal — required the mobile launcher to be detached from the SLS and the stack rolled back to the VAB for repairs. The rocket returned to Pad 39B on March 20. Crew quarantine began March 18 in Houston; the crew flew to Kennedy Space Center on March 27, where NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and CSA President Lisa Campbell greeted them.

Jeremy Hansen, the sole Artemis II crew member who has not yet flown to space, represents a particular stake in the mission. He is the first Canadian to serve on a lunar mission — the CSA presidency of Lisa Campbell and the presence of Isaacman at the March 27 arrival ceremony signaled the political weight attached to the crew. Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments who now runs NASA, has staked his tenure on the Artemis campaign returning humans to the Moon. The post-launch press conference, scheduled approximately two-and-a-half hours after liftoff following the SLS upper stage burn to high Earth orbit, will be the first public readout of whether the heat shield and the Orion avionics performed as expected.

What could still go wrong in five days is not a short list. The SLS core stage uses complex cryogenic systems that are sensitive to ground support equipment timing. The February rollback showed how quickly a valve anomaly can scrub a launch attempt. Quarantine protocols reduce but do not eliminate crew health risk. And the heat shield, while cleared by analysis, remains the least-understood piece of hardware on the vehicle — cleared not because it is fully characterized but because the alternative is grounding the mission indefinitely. Tanking operations begin at 7:45 a.m. EDT on April 1, with NASA+ launch coverage starting at 12:50 p.m. EDT. If all nominal indicators hold, the countdown runs to a two-hour window that closes at 8:24 p.m. EDT.

Artemis II is not the hard part. The Moon landing, currently planned for Artemis III, is the hard part — it requires the Human Landing System (SpaceX's Starship) and the next-generation spacesuits that still need to be demonstrated in orbit. Artemis II is the flight that tells the program whether the heat shield works, whether Orion's life support can sustain four people for ten days, and whether the ground systems can reliably launch an SLS without a rollback. Those are not small questions. They are the questions the program spent all of 2025 answering, mostly in the VAB. The next answer comes on April 1 — or April 6, or April 30.