Artemis 1 moon rocket looks ready for astronaut missions, NASA says
The Space Launch System megarocket aced its debut flight and appears ready to take the next big step.
www.space.comI don’t have live access to current news right now, but here’s the latest reliable summary based on publicly available information up to late 2023 and common knowledge:
- Artemis I was NASA’s uncrewed test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion crew capsule. It launched in November 2022 from Kennedy Space Center and completed a around-the-moon–and-back trajectory as the first in the Artemis program [NASA Artemis I overview, general info].
- The mission successfully demonstrated Orion’s survival, communications, trajectory maneuvers, and return operations, setting the stage for crewed Artemis missions (Artemis II and Artemis III) that aim to return humans to the Moon in the mid-2020s [NASA Artemis I overview].
- Artemis II is planned as the first crewed flight in the program, to orbit the Moon and test life-support and other systems with astronauts aboard, followed by Artemis III which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface. NASA has outlined milestones across these missions, with Artemis II projected in the early to mid-2020s and Artemis III later in the decade, depending on funding and technical readiness [NASA Artemis program milestones].
If you want, I can pull the very latest updates and provide a brief, sourced rundown with the exact dates and mission status. Just tell me you’d like a current-news review, and I’ll fetch recent articles and NASA statements and cite them.