A Sense of Doubt blog post #4061 - Artemis II - Ready For Launch (Hoping Not April Fool's)
I have always loved space since I was a little kid and had my parents help me bring a TV to school so we could all watch the moon orbits, pre Apollo 11, which took place in the summer.
So, I am super excited from the Artemis II launch, expected for tomorrow, April First, No Foolin'.
Go Artemis!!
LIVE COVERAGE
This live coverage link may well not be active if you look after the return in April 2026.
Why are NASA's Artemis astronauts wearing orange? What are they bringing to space? What to know about the preparation for their moon mission.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/article/why-are-nasas-artemis-astronauts-wearing-orange-what-are-they-bringing-to-space-what-to-know-about-the-preparation-for-their-moon-mission-200534238.html
The four astronauts preparing to take part in NASA’s Artemis II moon mission will be wearing bright orange spacesuits on the Orion spacecraft for this week’s historic launch.
Officially called the Orion Crew Survival System, NASA says the spacesuits can help keep astronauts alive if they lose cabin pressure.
“Astronauts could survive inside the suit for up to six days as they make their way back to Earth,” the space agency explains on its website.
The suits are also equipped with survival gear should they have to exit the spacecraft after splashdown.
THE SUITSEach suit comes with its own life preserver that includes a personal locator beacon, a rescue knife, and a signaling kit with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle and light sticks.
And the reason they’re neon orange? “To make crew members easily visible in the ocean,” NASA says.
The astronauts will also be equipped with another spacesuit “that functions as a self-contained personal spaceship,” and is designed to be worn outside the spacecraft.
When is Artemis II scheduled to launch?
After weeks of delays, NASA is targeting April 1 for the launch of the Artemis II mission — the first U.S. human lunar spaceflight in over 50 years.
The countdown clock officially started on Monday afternoon, and a two-hour launch window opens Wednesday at 6:24 p.m. ET, with additional launch opportunities through Monday, April 6.
The crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — won’t be landing on the moon. Instead, they’ll venture 600,000 miles around the moon and will return at 30 times the speed of sound, according to NASA.
During their 10-day trip, they’ll test life support systems in the Orion capsule for future crewed missions to the moon’s surface. A moon landing would occur during Artemis III, which is targeted to launch in 2027.
How else is the crew preparing for the mission?
The Artemis II crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Friday and have been in quarantine ahead of launch.
The four astronauts have spent months getting to know each other while preparing for the launch, which Wiseman says has helped him as the mission's commander.
“I can just watch my crewmates here. I know their facial expressions. They know mine,” Wiseman said during a virtual press conference on Sunday. “We know when we're tense. We know when an immediate decision needs to be made.”
Wiseman also said that the crew has practiced restraint.
“We try to remind ourselves — every single time we fly, we say, ‘No fast hands in the cockpit,’” he explained. “You do not want to do anything too quick in this vehicle. You need to take your time. You need to process everything.”
He added: “We're going to go slow and we have the ultimate trust in each other. And that's how we will get through this.”
Is the crew bringing anything special to space?
The astronauts will have a mascot named Rise, designed by Lucas Ye, a second-grader from Mountain View, Calif., which will serve as a zero-gravity indicator to visually indicate when they are in space.
Ye’s design was selected from more than 2,600 submissions from over 50 countries, according to NASA.
Fist bump, Rise!
— Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) March 29, 2026
Very emotional moment zipping up Rise, knowing we are bringing 5,647,889 names with us on this journey around the Moon. For all!
People from around the world submitted their names through the Send Your Name with Artemis campaign.
These names were downloaded… pic.twitter.com/gKxvrHw7M0
Inside the mascot is an SD card with the names of more than 5.6 million people who participated in the “Send Your Name With Artemis” campaign.
What will the crew eat?
The quality of airline food is often the butt of jokes, but NASA’s menu for the Artemis crew is enough to make even Earth-bound diners jealous.
A total of 189 unique food items will be brought along for the journey, including beef brisket, macaroni and cheese and cobbler. The food brought on board isn’t just chosen for its taste, however. It’s carefully chosen to meet the astronaut’s needs.
“Food selections are developed in coordination with space food experts and the crew to balance calorie needs, hydration, and nutrient intake while accommodating individual crew preferences,” NASA wrote.
Everything also needs to last without being refrigerated, and be easy to prepare and safe to eat in microgravity — that means minimal crumbs. Even with those restrictions, NASA is able to send a surprising variety of options, including 10 different drinks; five hot sauces; nine condiments, spreads and spices; and a variety of sweets.
Why does NASA want to go to the moon again?
The Artemis program is NASA’s long-term mission to return humans to the moon to establish a continuous human presence. The goal is to develop a lunar settlement at its south pole, a region where it’s believed water ice is abundant and could be used for drinking, breathing and as a source for rocket fuel.
Another long-term mission of Artemis is to lay the foundation for future crewed missions to Mars. The program is building on the legacy of the Apollo-era missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The Artemis program is named for the ancient Greek goddess of the moon — the twin sister of Apollo.
“It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone — every person on earth — look at the moon and think of it as also a destination,” Koch said.
(Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Five reasons human space flight is a bigger challenge today than it was during the Apollo era.
On Sept. 12 1962, President John F. Kennedy famously declared that the United States would “go to the moon … and do it first, before this decade is out.”
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
Then America followed through. Less than seven years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended from their lander and left humankind’s first lunar footprints.
Today that pace of progress might seem impossible. On April 1, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II — America’s first crewed lunar spaceflight in more than a half century. Its mission is clear-cut: Send four astronauts around the moon and back in 10 days.
But Artemis II’s mission is also … familiar. In 1968, three Apollo 8 astronauts circled the moon without landing, then traveled back to Earth.
In other words, NASA already pulled off a version of Artemis II nearly 60 years ago — and did so without the long delays that have plagued Artemis II itself (which was previously scheduled to lift off, and then delayed, almost every year since 2021).
How can going to the moon be so difficult if we already did it? Here are five reasons human space flight is such a big challenge today.
Rustiness
The last time humans set foot on the moon was in 1972, with Apollo 17. That was also the last crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit — period. Even uncrewed lunar landers fell out of favor soon after, with more than 35 years elapsing between one successful robotic landing on the moon’s surface (the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976) and the next (China’s Chang’e 3 in 2013).
“There were decades when people were not developing landers,” one expert told the Guardian in 2024. “The technology is not that common that you can easily learn from others.”
Turns out that it’s hard to resume human space exploration after a multi-decade hiatus — especially when complex new technologies need to be integrated with older ones.
“We stopped, and then we forgot,” Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, recently told Scientific American. Just because you ran an Olympic marathon 50 years ago, Pace went on to explain, doesn’t mean you could do it again tomorrow
Ambition
Despite some superficial similarities, the Artemis program isn’t really Apollo, part two. Apollo sought to put people (briefly) on the moon. Artemis aspires to establish a permanent base there — a base that astronauts can later use as a stepping stone to Mars.
That’s a much more ambitious goal, and it defines every facet of Artemis: the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that propels the astronauts beyond Earth’s atmosphere; the Orion spacecraft in which the four of them can spend 21 days; separate next-generation space suits for launch and entry as well surface exploration; robotic landers carried on commercial rockets that deliver equipment to the moon itself; and finally, the reusable rocket-and-human-lander system — either SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin's Blue Moon — that will eventually orbit the moon and dock with Orion before transporting the Artemis crew to and from the surface.
In short, there are more moving parts now than there were in the 1960s, which means more potential delays.
Motivation
In the 1960s, the U.S. was competing with the Soviet Union in an existential space race. Cold War conventional wisdom decreed that whichever superpower arrived on the moon first would reinforce its military dominance — and project precisely the kind of soft power that could sway newly independent countries to choose democracy over communism.
There’s a certain clarity about one-on-one competition, and the U.S. immediately mobilized around beating the Soviets to the moon. Now that clarity is gone. In its place is a more nebulous (and less pressing) objective: international cooperation in the name of scientific discovery. Japan, Canada, the United Arab Emirates and the European Space Agency are all collaborating with the United States on Artemis.
As a result, one president’s spaceflight plans are often canceled by the next, only to be resurrected later in a different form, and delays accrue while countries do the important work of getting on the same page about the future of space and contributing hardware to the cause.
Money
Between 2012 and 2025, the U.S. spent roughly $93 billion on the Artemis program. Total spending is expected to top $105 billion by 2028, the year the first Artemis astronauts are supposed to land on the moon.
That’s no small sum. But Apollo cost more than three times as much: about $320 billion in today’s dollars, according to the Planetary Society. Likewise, about 4% of the federal budget went to NASA in the Apollo era. Today the space agency is lucky to get 1%.
Experts say that shift is sensible. “There’s no reason to spend money like it was a war,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University and founder of the Space Policy Institute, told Scientific American. “There’s really no national interest or political interest that provides the foundation for that kind of mobilization at this point.”
But sensible or not, less funding almost always means slower progress.
Safety
Given the scientific, cooperative nature of today’s moon missions — not to mention all the advances in computer modeling since the 1960s — it would be irresponsible for NASA not to consider every possible safety consequence of Artemis — to the astronauts themselves and to the broader environment.
This wasn’t quite the case during the Apollo era. Back then, swashbuckling fighter pilots were converted to astronauts and rocketed into space much in the way they’d previously been deployed to war: with the knowledge that they were doing something very, very dangerous. The risk was worth the reward (i.e., winning the space race).
But today engineers can run detailed simulations on Orion’s materials and the stresses the capsule will be under, including high temperatures and intense acceleration forces — and that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for years.
Even then, Artemis I — an uncrewed moon-orbiting mission launched in 2022 — showed that Orion’s heat shield broke down differently than predicted; that bolts on the spacecraft faced “unexpected melting and erosion”; and that the power system experienced anomalies that could endanger the future crew.
It took time for NASA to resolve these issues — just as it will take time to address any issues with, say, Orion’s life support systems that arise during its first crewed mission. Building earthbound infrastructure is slower and more expensive today than it was in the 1960s; so too is exploring the cosmos.
Some would argue that the tradeoff is worth it. “For Artemis, having a more robust rocket system, asking people what they think, keeping people safer and working with global partners are probably better for this world — even if they don’t result in expedience off-world,” Scientific American concluded in its recent story on the subject.
Put another way: At least NASA is still doing hard things, even if they’ve gotten (a lot) harder.
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- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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