Watch NASA roll out Artemis 2 moon rocket tonight ahead of April 1 launch

NASA moves its Artemis 2 moon rocket to Launch Pad 39B tonight, targeting an April 1 liftoff that would return humans to lunar orbit for the first time since 1972.

Engineers are targeting 8 p.m. EDT Thursday to begin rolling the 322-foot Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule from Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad. The fully-stacked vehicle weighs 11 million pounds and will crawl along at roughly 1 mph on crawler-transporter 2 — the same vehicle that moved Apollo Saturn V hardware. The 4-mile journey can take up to 12 hours. NASA will stream the move live on its YouTube channel.

The crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch of NASA, plus Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — entered quarantine Wednesday evening in Houston. They will fly to Kennedy approximately five days before launch and continue isolation in the astronaut quarters there.

The April 1 target is firm, but narrow. NASA's launch window runs through April 6, with a backup opportunity on April 30. If weather or a technical issue scrubs the first attempt, the schedule holds — but another rollback would likely push to the end of the month.

That risk is real. The rocket was already rolled back to the VAB at the end of February after engineers found an electrical harness on the core stage's flight termination system that needed replacement. Originally slated for a February launch, the mission was bumped once before. The harness fix went faster than expected this time — NASA reassessed the rollout date on March 17 and moved it back to Thursday after initially planning a Friday departure.

Artemis 2 is a 10-day free-return trajectory: Orion will loop around the Moon and come back to Earth without entering lunar orbit. It's comparable to Apollo 8's profile, designed to stress-test the spacecraft with crew aboard before the more complex orbital insertion and docking maneuvers planned for Artemis 3. No landing on this flight.

The geopolitical subtext is worth naming: the United States has not sent humans beyond low Earth orbit since December 1972. NASA's sustained-use argument for SLS/Orion is that it provides a government-owned, NASA-directed path to cislunar space — distinct from SpaceX's Starship, which NASA is also buying as a lunar lander for Artemis 3. Two independent transport systems, one Artemis architecture.

For the people building hardware in this program, the cadence matters. SLS has now flown once (Artemis 1, uncrewed, 2022) and is about to fly crewed. That's two flights in four years — slow by commercial standards, but a deliberate pace that NASA argues reduces integration risk. Whether that argument holds is a different question. The rocket is expensive, the schedule has slipped, and the Chinese lunar program is moving.

Watch the rollout. If the rocket makes it to the pad and stays there, the real pressure starts.