Artemis II launched Wednesday with four astronauts aboard. The heat shield they're trusting was redesigned.
During the uncrewed Artemis I flight, the AVCOAT ablative material that protects Orion during reentry did not perform as expected. Trapped gases built up during atmospheric entry and had nowhere to go, cracking the heat shield. NASA kept the AVCOAT material but updated the block design to help gases escape, and switched from a skip re-entry profile to a direct re-entry, Phys.org and The Conversation reported. Artemis II is the first crewed flight to test whether those changes hold under actual conditions. Artemis IV, currently planned for 2028, is the mission that will attempt the first crewed lunar landing. This crew flies first.
The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39B at 6:35 p.m. EDT Wednesday, NASA's official press release confirms. The mission had been planned for a 2019 to 2021 debut. Actual launch was April 1, 2026. Per-launch cost estimates run $2 billion to $4 billion, Reuters reported.
The crew: Reid Wiseman commanding, Victor Glover piloting, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency as mission specialists. Glover will become the first person of color to travel to the lunar vicinity, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American, per Wikipedia. The crew named their spacecraft Integrity. The planned flight covers roughly 252,000 miles over about 10 days, with a lunar flyby on April 6. That distance exceeds the 248,000-mile record set by Apollo 13, Reuters noted.
Two issues surfaced during the countdown. At T-minus 52 minutes, a flight termination system ground link fault and a battery temperature sensor anomaly on the Launch Abort System both cleared before liftoff, NASA's live updates blog confirms. Neither was serious enough to scrub the launch.
What changed before they got to the pad: the Lunar Gateway program NASA had been building toward was cancelled in March, weeks before this flight. The new plan is a $20 billion surface base on the moon, with the already-built Gateway hardware repurposed where feasible, Reuters reported. The landers meant to carry astronauts down are both behind schedule. SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System and Blue Origin's Blue Moon are each running roughly two years late for a 2028 crewed landing target, Reuters separately confirmed. First astronauts on the lunar surface, whenever that happens, may arrive before their ride is ready.
NASA's head count has also shrunk. The agency lost roughly 20 percent of its workforce under the Trump administration's federal downsizing efforts last year, Reuters reported. This launch is happening with a materially smaller agency than the one that originally planned it.
They'll find out in a few days whether the changes NASA made to the heat shield and re-entry profile hold.
† Add a citation or include footnote: 'Source-reported; not independently verified.'
† Add a citation or include footnote: 'Source-reported; not independently verified.'
