Artemis II Post Launch News Conference

From left to right, Bethany Stevens, NASA communications; NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman; NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya; Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate; and Norm Knight, director, NASA’s Flight Operations Directorate participate in a news conference on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, inside the John Holliman Auditorium of the NASA News Center at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to discuss the launch of the Artemis II test flight. The Artemis II mission will take Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back.

What is said in the film

Two one booster ignition and liftoff. The crew of Artemis two, now bound for the moon. Humanity's next great voyage begins. Good. Roll pitch.

Roger. Roll pitch. Houston. Now controlling the flight of integrity on the Artemis two mission around the moon. The integrity aimed high and high on time.

Passing 30s to the flight's integrity passes the ultimate vehicle target milestone. Mission control. Houston, say good performance. Good morning. Engines.

Space launch system core. Stage integrity. Three miles an altitude traveling more than 1200 miles per hour. Good evening, and welcome to NASA's Artemis II post-launch news conference. I'm Bethany Stevens, senior advisor and press secretary, and I will be your moderator today.

I am joined by Administrator Jared Isaacman. Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, acting associate administrator for the Exploration System Development Mission Directorate, Doctor Lori Glaze and Director of Flight Operations Norm Knight. Administrator Isaacman will give opening remarks, and then we will open the floor to questions. If you are dialing in to be with us here today, please press Star one to get in the queue. And with that administrator.

Thanks, Bethany. Good evening everyone. So today, April 1st, 2026, 6:35 p. m. NASA's Space Launch System rocket lifted off the pad with 8.

8 million pounds of thrust, carrying the Orion spacecraft and the Artemis two crew out to Earth orbit and beginning America's grand return to the moon. Now, about 51 minutes into the flight, during a planned handover between satellites, the Orion spacecraft underwent a communications issue, leading to a temporary partial loss of comms. The uplink from Capcom to the crew was being heard by the crew, but we cannot hear their responses for a brief period of time. There were no issues with the vehicle itself. Comms with the crew have been restored.

We're actively working the issue and we'll keep you informed. The Orion spacecraft has successfully separated from the core stage, and its solar arrays have been deployed as planned. Soon, the crew will execute the apogee raise burn, placing the spacecraft into a stable high Earth orbit. As we prepare for the trans lunar injection and the journey into cislunar space. NASA astronauts Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen are safe there, secure, and they're in great spirits.

We will continue to monitor their health and status as we as we move into the next phase of the Artemis two mission. So after a brief 54 year intermission, NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon. We have arrived at this point through a sustained effort and national commitment and the work of thousands across the agency, our industry partners and our international allies. I want to personally thank the ground crews, pad controllers, the entire workforce here at Kennedy Space Center. This mission belongs as much to you as it does to the crew.

The crew is now in the capable hands of Mission Control Houston, the Johnson Space Center, where teams will guide Orion through each phase of the mission with the same discipline and precision that has brought us to this moment. We have certainly been here before. We know the challenges ahead. We have a lot of checkouts to get through before TLI and when, if all goes well, everything, is go. Artemis two will be moon bound.

You have our commitment to keep the public is informed as possible on this historic mission. And we will celebrate when this crew. We will hold our celebration until this crew is under parachutes and splashes down off the West Coast, United States. Thank you. So with that, we will open this up to questions and we will start here in the room if we have any takers.

We'll start right up here. Congratulations to all of you on a successful launch so far. My name is Jim Siegel. I'm with Florida media now, and I'm curious about when, the astronauts will have their first meal, on this mission. And, secondly, is somebody on the on the earth here, back in Houston or somewhere keeping track of what they eat during this entire mission?

And, and how do they go about doing that? Do they tell them what to eat, or do they kind of select what they want? What do you think? Well let's see. I'll, I'll jump in on this one.

What I'll tell you is they do have plan meals. Okay. So they have a planned, meal today. I will tell you, they're very busy. So Asset day is very tough.

It's tough physiologically, and it's tough from a workload issue as well. And so, this timeline between now when the crew goes to sleep. So it's more of about 830 is pretty packed. They're going to snack. They probably have some pre-positioned meals.

I know they did in their, flight suit. Some of the snacks that they can, can use if they need. But I will also tell you that flight day one and flight day two, you might not feel like eating a lot. And, and that's just part of it. Your your body is acclimating to Zero-G.

Your physiological physiology is transitioning from A1G environment to zero g. And it's it takes a little bit of adapting. So right now, they're working hard. They are, doing what they need to do. They sound great on the.

So that was really a good signal to us that, that they're feeling well, but just know that that's part of the equation, you know, when they get on orbit. As far as the food being tracked. Yes. We have a, a food lab, and we have, folks at the Johnson Space Center tracking what they eat, the nutrition, the calories. It makes a difference.

They do this on Artemis. They do it on space station as well. So we're well versed in that. We want to make sure that they're healthy. And we also want to make sure we know what they're doing, what they're eating.

So we can also track that and make sure that, they don't need any supplements or anything additional. Thank you. We'll head over to Joey. Thanks, guys. And congrats on the clean launch so far.

Jared or whoever wants to answer, how were you able to resolve the communications issue, and do you have any guesses as to what might have caused that? And was there any part of the mission so far that appeared off nominal, or is everything looking good? Just curious to hear how things are going on that. Thanks. Well, on the on the comms issue and I don't know, there may be someone here that has a little more detail than I do of having to run around quite a bit, but, I think they're still looking into trying to really understand exactly what was going on there.

But it is, it's restored, which is important. I think it just it was during it was during handover. Tejas was. Yeah. Sometimes that squirrely ground configuration you got to you got to get that right.

So hopefully that's what it is. But we'll, we'll chase it down. But they were able to recover. They had that intermittent forward and return link. So they the burns that they need to onboard it was never an issue.

We just it was unusual for it to be dropped out for a couple minutes. So that's what we're telling you. We had a controller issue with the toilet when they spun it up. So we got to work through that. That's going to take a maybe a few hours to troubleshoot.

So there was also a water tank valve. There's four water tanks in Orion. There's a crossover valve that connects the two gangs of tanks. It's supposed to be open to ensure maximum flow. It was closed during ascent.

You know, when you shake the thing, things like that happen. So they're going to reset the valve. And then they had a recurrence of the on Artemis one, we had a latching current limiter failure on a piece of electronics, a transient failure when it gets exposed to radiation. They took one hit of those. We took about 24 or 25 of those during Artemis one.

Again, normal. The onboard, fall detection cleans that up. But that's we're just getting started doing. This this flight does. And a lot of what we're doing here is exactly this, trying to test out all of the things that require the crew interaction.

Right. And so there's a we anticipate to have a lot of these for that's what we're here for. Work through them. So apogee raise burn we're go. So they're going to stay in space.

Sawyer. Thank you. Sawyer Rosenstein NSF. I noticed that the slide wire baskets happened to deploy during launch. Is that something that was expected?

And can you give any initial reports, at least what you've seen from the cameras of how the mobile launcher is doing, given the hope to be able to quickly turn it around? Yeah. Do you have something on the baskets? I can talk about the turnaround. The baskets are.

Yeah, they're supposed to get out of the way. That's part of the plan. So, otherwise they take plume loads and we don't like that. So I can tell you, on the mobile launcher, our team has already been looking at a lot of the imagery that we have. That was taken, both during and after, in assessing that, trying to get the condition.

We've got teams, I believe, going out there. They might already be out on their way. To take a real look at some of the good things that we've seen, relative to Artemis one. One of the issues we had was that the water that was supposed to be spraying down the launch pad. So, that there were some issues there that didn't happen.

We saw a lot of corrosion. The water was working, so things were getting washed down. We're still also going to remove, some of the, some of the parts so that we can do some of that cleaning to make sure we don't have those corrosion issues. We also didn't we haven't seen evidence of things like after Artemis one, like the elevator doors were blown off. We haven't seen that.

So we're we're we're optimistic, but we we got to get out to the pad. We got to look, we did a lot of changes after Artemis one, trying to harden the systems so that we can turn it around faster. We do anticipate there will be some items that will need to be replaced. It's it's a pretty violent environment. But, but we're hopeful that that's minimized and will, as soon as we have more information on that, will definitely let you guys know where we stand and how quickly we think we can get it turned around.

Thanks, Lauren. Lauren Grush with Bloomberg. I just wanted to get a gut check on how we're feeling about the upcoming proximity and ops operation. Do we have any concerns with that Tejas delay, or is that not an issue for that? I would say right now we're on for the for the proximity operations demo.

I haven't heard anything that's keeping us from that norm. Now on track, ready to go. Victor Glover is going to be flying. It rate's going to be working the procedure with him. And, cross-checking and Jeremy and Christina are going to be looking out the windows, also spotting, cross-checking, using cameras and imagery.

And it, it should be beautiful. So we can't wait. We'll go right over here. Yes. Burt Dict from at Aster magazine and National Space Society.

Just wondering if the astronauts reported what the ride was like to orbit. I know with the space shuttle, it was a pretty rough ride into the until there was SRB setup. Was this similar? Have you heard? I have not heard a report yet.

I know we will get a report again. When? When Mico happened, immediately. They were getting prepped to do their perigee raise maneuver. That's critical.

Otherwise they come back to Earth, which we don't want them to. So they got that. They are, working to get their spacesuits off there. You know, they just got the IRB, burn, which was very important. So now they're working to get their suits off.

So they are very busy. Now. Later today, I anticipate they will call down and give us a full brief as to, you know, how the Proxmox demo went, how the ride uphill went. And I personally can't wait to hear the comparison between this massive rocket and the shuttle. It's great.

Thank you. Micah. Thanks, Bethany. Micah. Made by the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe for the administrator. I'd like to ask you just. I know we're early on here how you're thinking about success for this mission. Defining success. A lot of tests ahead.

And just what happens if you don't kind of meet that standard as the, the flight unfolds? Thanks so much. I mean, to me, success is, under shoots and, in the, in the water safely after, ten day mission duration. So, no early, off ramps there. I think we're, you know, right now, we're already getting good data.

We've never flown Orion with, with crew on board, so that's pretty important. I mean, understanding the Orion spacecraft is, you know, it's paramount in this one to progress on to integrated operations of Orion with a with a lander. Every day we're getting data that says it was mentioned from the get go. This is a test mission for sure. No crew have ever ridden this before.

And we'll keep getting it and gathering data over the next ten days. We'll share updates, but, we'll call success when they're in the water safely. And, and we'll start working on the next mission. Jackie, I am right here. Sorry if I missed it.

I just wanted to check in on the status of the perigee and apogee burns. Are those both finished at this point? And then I also wanted to check, her best way to explain to the audience why we're doing that apogee raise maneuver and why we go into that, that higher orbit. Thanks so much. Don't take it.

I mean, I can certainly say we've we completed the perigee raise maneuver that was done pretty quickly, as you heard. And, the apogee raise burn should have already happened. That should have been happening while we sat here. They were getting ready as we were walking in. And then if you want to talk, maybe about the rest.

So we go into a high Earth orbit. Roughly the perigee is about 1000 miles, give or take, of the Earth, 25,000. So it's it's, pretty elliptical. That's getting us everything we do is getting us set up for the trans lunar injection burn. And so it's getting these burns.

It's, it's all converging down to what we call TLI. So we got to get the eclipse system checked out. We got to make sure we have our redundancy. We got to make sure these burns go off where they should go off and get Orion and the ESM configured exactly where it needs to be. So when it comes around and it's time for the transponder injection burn, off we go.

And that takes us really? That puts us outbound to the moon. That's a real big commit point. And, so you'll be hearing more about that, tomorrow. Matt mentioned it not only sends us outbound to the moon, but it also sets us up for the gravity assist that brings us back.

So we are set all the way? Yes. Once we make that burn, go right back here. Hi, TJ. TJ, monsieur, with the Epoch Times.

Thank you all so much. Something has been really talked about is that the Space Launch System predates the Artemis program going all the way back to 2011. So 15 years really invested in this. And just how does it feel to finally see it? You know, launch with the human crew on board?

You've you've been. Yeah. I mean, right now, like, so we're focused on the next ten days. But I mean, I'll tell you, it's I'm incredibly proud of the folks that worked on this machine for, for as long as they did. And one thing we didn't talk about earlier was, you know, that one of the big objectives is getting the organization and getting our qualification standards and getting our certification rigor up to the standard for crewed flight.

That's a big you know, even though the mission is a complicated mission, moving the entire organization to a to a mindset of thinking about risk and the right way to to fly crew is a is a big deal. And making sure that the way we've gotten the machine configured to fly crew with the resilience and reliability we care about is also a big deal. So it takes time. I mean, you know, we've got a lot in front of us. But I mean it's a for the guys that were out there, you know, there is a big big celebration and launch control for the rocket guys.

The rocket guys can go out and play now, but the spacecraft guys get a lot of homework. So they're going to go work on that. But yeah, for them I could see it on their faces. Yeah. Jeff.

Jeff. Our spacesuits during the countdown, we heard controllers working through, a few issues. One with the flight termination system, one with a launch abort system battery, and it sounded like there was a brief telemetry drop out. I wonder if you could provide a little bit more details about those issues and how you resolved them? Relatively quickly.

Yeah. So, Jeff, the FTS issue was, we were doing an end to end test. We have to confirm that we can get a signal from the range to the machine and then back. We weren't getting we weren't we weren't able to close that that entire end and loop that the guys at the at the range, they were really quick on their feet. They swapped to a different, range receiver, which is a slightly different heritage, but has the same fundamental, algorithms on it.

And they were able to switch over to that and able to confirm a good and then signal, which is really clever. We, we had thought about, getting a receive only box that we had in the VAB and shipping that over to, to Patrick quickly. So they could do it, but they were able to fix it on the fly over there. So that was good. And once we knew we could confirm the the end to end loop of that command, then we didn't need that receive.

We don't need to do that test more than once. Just we just need to verify the commands, get on board. And so once we confirm that that command was there, then that we met all of our public safety risk for the, launch abort system, we had a batteries of two batteries, several temperature sensors on both batteries. We had one poke out out a family. We want to make sure all of them are tracking within certain limits.

But we could confirm, given the locations of the temperature sensors where they are in the battery on the battery itself, that the reading was instrumentation, because there was an incredible physics based explanation for why that that sensor would be that far high, was an order of magnitude off scale, high from that, from the rest. And so we're able to quickly vote that sensor out. So that was two of the two of the major issues. But again the team this is what the training is for. This with the practice is for is to go into those things and knock them out quickly.

So they did did really well. We'll go right over here. You can I noticed there was a lack of public address announcing outside, and there was a lot of going back and forth when we realized there were some issues and we had to go back inside to find out, or we had to have our phones. Why was there no public address system available with loudspeakers outside? So I'm not sure what what you're referring to.

The I mean, we're not sure what issue you're talking about, about the public address. Answer. Okay, I just. Available to people outdoors. And I thought that was a lacking which.

We will we'll take a look and that will definitely look into that. I wasn't aware that that happened. So thank you for that information. That's new. And, we'll definitely look into it.

We'll go right back here. Thomas more Sky news administrative. I mean, as a fellow astronaut, what were your feelings watching your crew rising above pad 39 B and do you feel that extra sense of responsibility for the crew as they head further into space? I certainly, felt that it would be, just from, I guess, my perspective in it that, I don't know, it's, it is far less stressful to be strapped into the rocket than to be responsible for it here on Earth. So I definitely had those feelings quite a bit.

But, you know, you drive a lot of confidence from the process that leads up to this moment. I mean, literally, the army of people that came together across NASA. All our contractors, all our partners to prepare for this, every step that leads up to it. This is what I, you know, was really, honestly going through my mind, through it is all the testing that goes into it. The integrated testing, the flight readiness review, everything that goes into a a flight readiness review.

Not to mention you have a truly exceptional crew up there that have been training for years on this, that gives you the confidence to undertake this mission, especially knowing the implications that it is part of a much bigger program. This is this is America and our partners return to the moon, and we're trying to do it this time to stay. So incredibly important. Mission certainly felt the pressure of it, but it was relieved. You know, based on the confidence we have in the in the team here at NASA and everyone who contributes to it.

Thank you for the question. We'll come right up here. Frederick is still with France 24. First, of course. Congratulation to NASA for the grand return to the moon.

Mr. Administrator, I have this question that they ask me constantly in Europe and and in the States in the 60s, NASA was using just the slide rule to go to the moon, and they could launch almost every three months. What? Of course they had more money. Probably.

But what happened in 50 years? Why is it so difficult to make it again? What has changed? Thank you. Well, for sure, we, we new look, it's a it's a very fair question.

I know a lot of people ask it not just in your country, but, here in the United States. Certainly, financial resources are part of the equation. NASA's budget, if I recall, was somewhere between 4 and 4. 5% of the discretionary budget during the space race, about a quarter percentage of that today. And I mean, to be very honest with you, I think competition is a factor in this as well.

You know, it's, it's a great way to, you know, mobilize the resources of a nation and concentrate on something extremely challenging. And that's what we did in the 1960s. And I think with absent some competition, we focused a lot on partnerships and all the all that we could do collectively with respect to, to science and discovery. But competition can be a good thing. And we certainly have competition now.

I think that's why you're seeing us start to concentrate our resources back to the, back to the objective and do it, with a great coalition across the NASA workforce, our contractors, all our partners that have come together are our stakeholders in, Congress and the administration who came here to witness this launch. It's because they know we have competition. And, and this one, this one's going to be going to be close. And I think as a result, you're going to see a lot more progress, more so than you have in, you know, since when, when this was originally conceived under under constellation, we're going to get back into the business of launching rockets on a, on a regular cadence. And we're going to bring the world along with us.

So we're going to take a couple of sunbridge questions for just a moment. Reminder that you can join by pressing Star one to get into the queue. We're going to start with Will Robinson Smith from Spaceflight Now. Hi. Thank you Bethany, and congratulations everyone on a good mission so far.

Question about the upcoming Cliburn tomorrow. What point during the day will the team conduct a poll on readiness to proceed into the TLI? And what are the main criteria that you'll be assessing to make that final determination? Thank you. Okay, well, the TLI burn, actually happens about the time that launch happens.

So it's one day into the mission. So tomorrow, eastern time would be about 635 ish. Obviously, those burn times can change, so. So check that, before tomorrow. But what are the teams looking for before TLI?

We're looking to make sure that the life support systems work, that the vehicles healthy, the life support systems have been checked out. They're ready to go. We assure that those are functional, because once we commit to TLI, they have to function. And so we want to make sure. So that's why, we spend a day checking out the systems.

Assessment is, you know, you shake, shake, rattle and roll a little bit. The vehicle you saw that today, and you can imagine what that does to the systems, the systems that are performing very well. We anticipate that they continue to, but we want to get some track record on them. Before we do that, we also want to make sure we have redundancy in the system, for comm, for environmental life support, propulsion, those type things. Before we embark on that TLI mission.

So that's what the mission control team in Houston, will be doing tomorrow. Jeff Rad again. And his team, as the lead flight director, will be, well into that. The teams are well versed on it. They have trained for it.

They work very closely in conjunction with the engineering team, the mission evaluation room in Houston, where the engineers that have the intricate knowledge of Orion come together with the operations team, and together they work with the crew to, to make sure that the vehicle, you know, is, doing what we want to and accomplishing the mission objectives that we need to. But it always comes down to crew safety, vehicle safety, and mission objectives in that order. You might also mention, as those teams are checking out all of those systems. There will also be a meeting of the mission management team that's led by John Hunnicutt, who I think many of you have seen before. And they'll be meeting tomorrow afternoon, to hear all of the results from the from what's happened over the last, the last day, in preparation to make the decision on whether or not we proceed with the TLI burn.

We will next go right back here to Manuel. Thank you so much, man. With the introduction, I understand that the CubeSats are going to be deployed, like five hours into the flight. Is there any chance we're going to see live images or the deployment? And then, when, is the crew.

I know they're super busy right now, but when are they going to start using the flyway? Flywheel machine, on its way to the moon when everything is more like. The second question was to do when they start doing the manual as far as the will machine of the flywheel machine. Sorry. Thank you.

The exercise machine, I guess. So, like. Yeah, I'll, I'll hand that to you, but I can answer the, the cubesats. So the CubeSats are, installed in the Orion stage adapter, which is actually, a part of the, the upper stage piece. Right.

So once Orion separates from the upper stage, we'll do the prox ops demonstration. Right. And then, once Orion has cleared and we're away, then they will be deployed. So Orion won't be there to take images of them. And once they are deployed, they, each of them have their own plans for being able to communicate back down to earth to various ground stations.

They have their own communication plan. So we'll start to get information back from those individual CubeSats. So that's kind of the plan and the path forward, on the CubeSat deployment and what you what you can expect when you take one more question from the foam bridge from Christopher Mic of the Hudson, Star Observer. Thank you very much. Congratulations to all the teams.

Thus far, I had a question from an earlier, media availability with Jeremy Hansen. He made mention of if, the mission launched on April 1st, they would be experiencing a lunar eclipse. And I just want to follow up on that if that's where that would be happening in the in the mission timeline, and if there would be any, video chance of that happening, or is that just going to be on the astronauts photography at the time? So you may have to answer the question on whether or not the there'll be the availability of the, what kind of real time I, I'm not sure what we'll have there, but the the crew will get to observe the eclipse. This is pretty unique.

It's kind of interesting. It actually doesn't happen when they're out of comm. So they will be having communication during that eclipse time. But, during the eclipse, the, the moon will be blocking, the sun. They will be able to see the sun's current, sun's corona, which is kind of cool.

So they've been having a lot of science lessons over the last couple of days to, to learn about that in the eventuality that we actually launched today. So they're, they're prepared to make those, those solar observations. It'll be a pretty cool and unique opportunity. I'm sure we'll get some images down at some point. I just don't know if they'll be live talk.

Thank you very much. Tariq Malik with Space. com for the administrator. There been a lot of comparisons of Artemis two to Apollo eight. You know, a pioneering mission daring that sent astronauts on an untested crewed vehicle around the around the moon.

And I'm very curious, given last week's ignition event and how that really laid out an audacious, an ambitious plan, to really explore the moon in an in a stepping stone approach way where you see Artemis two in that plan. And basically the importance of riding on this mission before you can make that next step for next year. So, I mean, no matter, I guess, how you slice it, it's the opening act for sure. I think there are areas where we're clearly combining, you know, Apollo seven, Apollo eight into a, into a single mission, the, which we should be able to do. There has been to your question earlier.

There's been substantial progress, you know, over the last half century, we have tools. We've certainly been there before. So I would expect us to be able to get some, you know, I guess, mission efficiencies through, but I would say that, what we learn from this, for sure, we'll get will inform how we think about Artemis three. Now, there's certainly big picture objectives in that. We'd like to get the lander together.

We'd like to test that out in Earth orbit before, before we go to the moon with it. But if there are things that we don't see, maybe it is comm related issues, and we're going to try and fix those, and we're going to want to validate that on the next mission as well. So and that that should be the idea. Right. As we progress, forward.

I suspect when, you know, Artemis three comes around, we're going to learn a lot about the integrated operations that will want to validate and ensure is rolled into the subsequent missions. But yes, this should be a philosophy that we take across all of the grand efforts that we are, we are pursuing right now to not necessarily jump to the, to the ultimate desired state, but to build up to it. You can get jump right up here. Hi Richard Ellingham, BBC future. I related to Apollo eight in a way.

Really, I guess wonder what plans had gone into a new Earthrise image. So a lot of it's gone into the aspirational nature of this mission. Have you a plan? I assume you have a plan. What is the plan?

Oh, go ahead, I, I do know that the teams have been looking at what the opportunities might look like. They've looked at, the different launch dates. And so I know that they're really going to try to make that happen. I can't give you a confirmation on that yet, but stay tuned. My understanding is they have been equipped with additional camera imagery, capturing, you know, equipment.

So we're going to do everything we can to try and make that happen. I'm going to go right back here. Thank you. I am from a Japanese news agency, Kyodo News. My question is to the administrator, the United States and China, competing over moon development.

What significance does today's launch have for the U. S and NASA? Thank you. Well, it's it's certainly an incredibly important step. I mean, this is the the first, you know, crewed mission into this environment in more than a half century.

And, on a rocket that has never flown human beings before, along with the spacecraft. So it's incredibly important, because we're going to learn an awful lot from this to, inform subsequent missions. So, yes, this is the beginning. You know, I can tell you, having, had an opportunity to speak with the Artemis two crew after, actually, after the state of the Union address, we talked a lot about what we wound up sharing with the world, at the ignition event about adding additional missions, accelerating production, building out a moon base. I think it was very energizing for the crew because they knew that they were.

You know, this is this is this is a risky mission, for sure. Any type of new, test flight mission going in this environment is going to be challenging. And they knew it was building up to something, something bigger. And, I think that, I think it was very helpful for them in that regard. So and certainly was very helpful for me to hear their feedback as well.

I would suspect a point or two wound up in, in the ignition event from them. So I'm going to go back here to the white shirt. Thanks. Denise Chow with NBC news. I think for Lori or Norm, I'm curious what you anticipate could be some of the biggest challenges over the next few days, whether that's from a spacecraft or system standpoint or crew workload.

I'll jump on flight day one from a crew workload is pretty tough between now and, TLI, we're working. The crew really hard. In fact, in their when they go to sleep tonight, they're woken up in the middle of their sleep to do the, to do the, perigee raise burn. And so, their sleep's disrupted. They're, you know, they're hitting on all cylinders.

They may not be feeling well on top of that. So we know that flight day one, and flight day two up to, TLI is really good. We know it drops often. And so going into this, we trained for that. We did simulations for this.

We put the crew in exactly that state. No, they weren't in on orbit. They probably were feeling great. But we got a good gauge. Hey, are we working them too hard?

And the mission control team is great because they're watching the crew constantly. They're watching their performance. And we also have a crew that's very good at saying, hey, enough's enough. And so together, we will make certain that, that we're doing everything in the best interest of meeting the mission objectives, making sure that we're not working the crew so hard that, you know, they make mistakes or something of that nature. And again, we work as a collective team going forward.

So this is our, our best opportunity. And, they may add more stuff to the timeline before it's all done. And they might take some stuff out, if we need to, but we adjust all the time on those things. So that's leading up to TLI. That's probably one of the the bigger challenges making sure we get those done.

You go right up here. Hi. Robert Pearlman with collectSPACE. com for the administrator. You mentioned the 53 year hiatus.

And, in that time now, most of the world's population wasn't alive for Apollo. Like, I think you and me. And I wonder if you have a sense of if even this early in the mission that we're that this has captured the imagination of those people that have never seen about anyone go to the moon before on a world level, on a on the international level. And how important is it to NASA to capture that support from the public? Yeah, I've said it many times.

I absolutely I think it's, you know, foundational for what we do here at NASA to inspire. It should be a component of every one of our missions. I've talked about, you know, I think after Artemis two, you're going to have more kids that are going to dress up as astronauts for Halloween. We want to inspire and, create interest, in the next generation to grow up and contribute to this endeavor. Now, how, how have we done so far?

And, you know, captivating the world's interest in, America's return to the moon? I don't know, you have to. You have to tell me. We've been, we've been, you know, rather busy the last couple hours, mate. I, I would say, and I felt this way going into it, that when we got down to t0, a lot of people would be paying attention.

I suspect, when some of the imagery starts to, maybe come back from the moon, that's going to that's going to further bring people into this story. Right. And then we, then we bring them home safely and we, we start preparing for again the, you know, the next chapter in the story. So, yeah, I think inspiration is extremely important. I think people you know, despite, you know, some of the commentary up to now, how many people really know we're going around the moon?

I'm willing to bet right now, a lot of people do. And, and I think will only draw in their interest further as the mission proceeds. Here we go. Right here. Robert Coppinger, British Interplanetary Society's spaceflight magazine, Commander Wiseman said during the crew news conference in September last year that, when they get off the planet, they may only spend 3 or 4 days going around the Earth.

What what sequence of events would would I need to happen for that to occur? I was quite surprised to hear him be so specific about such a scenario. I know you all talk about it being a test flight. So what would need to happen for that? For the mission to be curtailed in such a fashion?

I didn't come across the question had just confirm, it's kind of hard to hear, but, the question is, that the commander talked about one of the alternate missions where they maybe would stay in Earth orbit for three or 4 or 5 days. Yes. That would what would need to happen. So one of the one of the scenarios that would have led to that is if for some reason, during the launch, that the SLS did not quite deliver us to where we needed to be, or the upper stage didn't deliver us to the orbit that we needed to be in, that would have been one of the scenarios. I think that's probably the main, scenario that would have ended up in that one of those kind of alternate, missions.

Yeah. But I don't think we're going to need to worry about that, hopefully. But, you know, the other thing is if for some reason we're we're able to stay but we're not able to do the TLI burn, we would stay in Earth orbit. So there's a there's a couple of of scenarios where that could happen. You know, right back here.

Hi there, Joe fas with the gabber, for anybody. In the weeks leading up to the launch, we were talking about some of the distance records and altitude records and speed records that would be achieved that were contingent on the specific day and time of launch. I was wondering if we had a better concept of what those might be now that we are successfully off the ground. Thank you. Graham has that data for you.

Well, based on the the predicts right now, assuming all the burns go as planned and the timeline, is executed as we think it's going to be, it'll be on flight day six, at MT of about, oh, I don't know, 18 hours, 18. 5 hours. And again, check that as we get closer because burn durations and things like that matter. But that's where we will, exceed or beat the Apollo, distance record. Or at least that's where we believe that's going to happen.

So, that'll be exciting day. And we'll stand by to see, what, transpires. You're right here. Hi, I'm Andrew Yang from Kookmin Daily in South Korea. And first of all, congratulations on today's success for launch.

And my question is for admin administration layer. And this mission also carried a Korean satellite onboard. From your perspective, why does a crewed Rona mission like our teams to matter not just for United States, but for the global community? I think we say often, that when we undertake these type of endeavors, we never go alone. We go with, our international partners.

We have a Canadian Space Agency astronaut that's on board this mission. We are carrying a lot of CubeSats from our Artemis Accords, partners. And we are going to continue to do this going forward. The the, you know, Jaxa, is contributing a pressurized rover, a major contribution to, our efforts of having an enduring presence on the, on the lunar surface itself, the Italian Space Agency. Just a few days ago, we signed a memorandum of understanding for a habitation module.

On the surface of the moon, a component of the moon base and beyond. It was also a key component to the to the ignition event from last week, half of the Artemis accord partners were present. We spent a good portion of the second day talking together and recognizing that some of our partners, can make contributions like a pressurized rover or habitation module, and many others are going to work with their academic institutions and universities for science instruments that could wind up on the phase one component to the, to the moon base itself. So, or interesting tech demonstrations. This is something that NASA is extremely, proud of and will continue to do.

So as we, as we continue to press forward under this program. So we're going to do last question here. I'm going to go over to you in the back. For me, it's, Paul Brinkman Aerospace America. Can you just talk a little bit about the propellant loading this morning?

Was it flawless? Were there any leaks detected? Was it a repeat of the wet dress rehearsal? Did you learn anything? Yeah.

Go ahead. I, you know, I think it went extremely well. What I what I heard this morning, and and I may have an update, from later, but, you know, some of the leaks that we'd seen of the hydrogen, the, during the, the tanking for, for the hydrogen, we saw leaks below 1%, which was significantly lower. Again, the seal that we the seals that we replaced seem to perform extremely well. We did a, pressure test kind of partway through, and then the leak went up to about 1.

4%. Still, you know. Well, well, well, within the constraints, which 16% is the bound that we have? So I think it performed extremely well. We actually, I think finished the tanking early, from my, from what I understood.

So I think it went extremely well. So again, the seals that we had replaced out of the pad, after wet dress number one, I think that was very proved to be very successful. And with that, thank you all for coming out and covering humanity's return to the moon. Stay tuned for updates on NASA's social channels, including our continuous coverage on YouTube and NASA. Plus, go Artemus.

Thank you.

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