NASA entered final preparations Friday for the launch Artemis II, its first astronaut mission to the moon since 1972. Liftoff is set for no earlier than April 1.
NBC News reports the half-century journey to this point, where four astronauts set out on a 10-day voyage around the moon, has been long, winding and bumpy, not to mention inordinately expensive.
“This rocket was originally supposed to launch in 2016 and cost $5 billion,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that conducts research and advocacy to promote space exploration.
“It costs something like $20 billion now, 10 years after that.”
Combined, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft have cost more than $44 billion to develop.
The upcoming launch will be the first time they carry people and NASA announced the mission launch countdown is getting close.
Astronauts for the upcoming Artemis II mission listen as President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen are now focussed on their Artemis II journey, the launch team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and teams across the country will begin counting down about two days before liftoff.
Sending the Artemis II moon rocket skywards will lift off the agency’s first crewed mission under the Artemis program, testing the systems that will return astronauts to the moon for an enduring presence, and paving the way to human exploration of Mars.
As Breitbart News reported, an earlier attempt to begin the Artemis II mission was aborted back in February after engineers encountered hydrogen fuel leaks during a critical launch rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A very similar problem caused a six month delay to an Artemis mission in 2022.
