First Lunar Crew Since Apollo Could Launch in 4 Months. Seriously?

The Artemis 2 mission will be NASA’s most ambitious human spaceflight endeavor since the Apollo 17 Moon landing. Preparations for this feat have reflected its arduousness, with multiple delays pushing the launch back several years.

Now, Artemis 2 may lift off sooner than expected. During a press briefing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday, officials said the 10-day-long crewed flight around the Moon could launch as early as February 5 and no later than April.

​​â€The administration has asked us to acknowledge that we are, indeed, in what is commonly called a second space race,†said Lakiesha Hawkins, acting deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, according to Ars Technica. “There is a desire for us to be the first to return to the surface of the Moon. With that being said, NASA’s objective is to do so safely.â€

With geopolitical tensions and pressure from the Trump administration nipping at their heels, Artemis 2 mission specialists will need to work quickly if they hope to launch by early February. Let’s dive into how realistic this goal really is.

Where Artemis 2 stands now

Artemis 2 is the first crewed mission of NASA’s Artemis program, which ultimately aims to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon. The mission will use the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket to launch the Orion spacecraft, built to carry four astronauts around the Moon and back to Earth.

NASA’s Reid Wiseman will command the mission with fellow agency astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch as pilot and mission specialist, respectively. Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency will also serve as a mission specialist. Aboard Orion, the crew will fly on a “free return†trajectory, ensuring their return to Earth without entering lunar orbit.

The SLS has been fully stacked on Mobile Launcher 1 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center since May, according to NASASpaceFlight.com. On September 17, NASA declared the megarocket ready to fly the Artemis 2 crew, with its solid rocket boosters attached.

Now, they’re just waiting on Orion, which is in its final stages of preparation and is expected to be stacked atop the SLS later this year. Orion’s stage adapter—which connects the spacecraft to the SLS—arrived at Kennedy Space Center on August 19, according to Space.com. This ring-shaped adapter will also protect the capsule from flammable gases during launch and carry a set of cubesats to be deployed during the mission.

What still needs to happen before liftoff

Once engineers install the cubesats on the stage adapter, they will stack this hardware atop the SLS. After that, the Orion spacecraft will follow suit.

NASA will roll the combined stack out onto the launch pad and connect it to ground systems early next year, Artemis launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said during the Tuesday briefing, according to Ars. About two weeks later, NASA will conduct a “wet dress rehearsal,†fully loading the rocket’s first and second stages with propellant and running the countdown to just before engine ignition. If that goes well, they’ll drain the fuel and prepare SLS for launch.

That all sounds relatively straightforward, but completing this pre-launch process by February 5 will be a tall order. Each step—stacking Orion, connecting to ground systems, conducting the wet dress rehearsal, and addressing issues that will inevitably arise—takes weeks even under the best circumstances.

For Artemis 1, the timeline from the SLS’s arrival at the launch pad on March 17, 2022, to liftoff on November 16, 2022, spanned roughly eight months. This period included multiple launch scrubs and a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building due to Hurricane Ian.

Preparations for Artemis 2 have been further complicated by the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, which threatens to slash nearly a quarter of NASA’s funding. What’s more, thousands of employees have left the agency through deferred resignations since January, reducing NASA’s workforce by 20%.

All this to say that the odds of seeing Artemis 2 launch on February 5 are slim, but it’s not an impossibility. As NASA moves forward with the next stages of launch preparation, the launch timing for this historic mission will come into focus.