Artemis II Fueling Test News Conference - 4K

From left to right, Megan Cruz, NASA Communications; Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate; Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, launch director, Exploration Ground Systems Program; and John Honeycutt, chair, Artemis II mission management team, participate in a news conference on Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, to discuss the completion of the Artemis II second wet dress rehearsal at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The wet dress rehearsal allows the Artemis II launch team to run through operations to load propellant, conduct a full launch countdown, demonstrate the ability to recycle the countdown clock, and drain the tanks to practice timelines and procedures for launch. The Artemis II test flight will take Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch, from NASA and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), around the Moon and back to Earth from Launch Complex 39B at NASA Kennedy.

What is said in the film

Welcome to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, where we are starting today with this gorgeous view of Launch Pad 39 B and on the pad, of course, NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. NASA is targeting next month for its earliest opportunities to launch Artemis two for astronauts on a journey around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. I'm NASA's Megan Cruz, and you are watching a press conference to discuss this week's wet dress rehearsal. The Artemis two launch team rehearsed, fueling the rocket again ahead of launch.

And so to discuss how it went and the road ahead, we have this distinguished panel for you today. We have Lori Glaze right next to me here, NASA's Moon to Mars program manager and explorer Charlie Blackwell Thompson, Artemis launch director. And then finally, John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis two mission management team. Thank you all for being here. And as always, we are going to start with some opening remarks from each of them, and then we will go to your questions.

So, Lori, why don't you go ahead and kick us off. You bet. Thank you Megan. So it's been just, I think, a little under three weeks since we met to discuss wet dress number one. So I just want to thank everybody, who's here in the room and who's dialed in online.

To listen to the press briefing today. We're very excited to talk to you about, how the wet dress went yesterday. But I want to start first by thanking our incredible team, across all parts of the Artemis two program, that have gotten us to this point where we are today. They have done an enormous amount of work to get us to this point. And just over, as I said, the last three weeks, a little less than three weeks, a lot of work, learning from wet dress one, putting in place some fixes to things like the seals, at the quick, disconnect, interface, doing some replacement on the filters on the ground system side, thinking through, various aspects of how we implement, the wet dress rehearsal.

And I can say for the most part, those, fixes all performed pretty well yesterday. And Charlie is going to speak to that in a lot more detail. So that was really exciting. I mean, if you followed our progress, yesterday, we were able to fully tank the SLS rocket within the planned timeline. We demonstrated our crew module closeout activities with the closeout crew again on the timeline.

And we also successfully demonstrated, the launch clamp down. And again, Charlie, we'll talk in a lot more detail. We did navigate through a few issues. You'll hear a little bit about some of those, but overall the countdown went very, very smoothly. We do have work to go, to get our systems ready for launch, where we've already begun the day.

Two reviews from the wet dress yesterday. And there's some other work that needs to be done. Out of the pad. One thing I do want to say here today is that for, following that successful wet dress yesterday, we're now targeting March 6th as our earliest launch attempt. I am going to caveat that I want to be open, transparent with all of you, that there is still pending work.

There's work a lot of forward work that remains, including, the post wet dress analysis. Of course. We do have some significant work to be completed out of the pad, Charlie. We'll talk to that in more detail. And we also have a multi-day flight readiness review that will come up, later next week.

And so those things are all in front of us. We need to successfully navigate all of those, but assuming that happens, that it puts us in a very good position, to target the March 6th. We were fortunate yesterday to have several of our crew members present for the wet dress rehearsal. I was able to speak a little bit with, wit Jeremy Hanson. They're all very, very excited.

I was glad they could be here for for the wet dress. They are really getting, a lot of anticipation for a potential launch in March. And they go into quarantine this afternoon. This evening? So they will begin that quarantine later today.

The excitement for Artemis two is really, really starting to build. We can really start to feel it. It's it's coming. And I really can't wait to welcome you all back here to Kennedy Space Center when we're ready to fly, launch and fly this mission. You know, every night I, look up at the moon and I see it, and I get really excited because I can really feel she's calling us, and we're ready.

Thank you. I'm going to hand it over to Charlie. All right. Thanks, Laura. Appreciate that.

Well, let's see, since we were here, Laurie said a little over two weeks ago. There's been a lot of work out at the pad. So since WDR one, as you know, we had some leaks, in our, ground to flight interface there. And we have we went in and we changed both the eight inch and the four inch seal in that plate cavity. I'm happy to report that yesterday, both of those interfaces were rock solid.

We saw maybe 1% or less, in that eight inch, line in that interface, which is, is really solid. And then, and actually it was a little less than that. And then about 1. 5% in the four inch. So really no leakage to speak of.

So it was really performed well. So the work that the team did paid off. You know, we did a hydrogen integrity test, before we went back to wet dress. We felt that that was important to get a little understanding of that interface before we brought the entire vehicle up and tank both stages in both commodities. So we got a little bit of data out of that that helped us pinpoint that.

We believe the leak source was primarily from our eight inch seal. We changed them both, though, because we were in there and it just made sense to go do that. Yesterday we got into tanking. We gave the go for tanking at 928 in the morning, so we were a little bit ahead of schedule. Of course, the call to stations was the night before powered up the vehicle elements got everything configured, got into all of our preps.

We were ready for load yesterday morning. Gave the go for that. We did make a couple changes to our wet dress count down from wet dress number one. We added a little extra time, into the hole before tanking. And then in the hold after tanking and we did that.

In the event that we ran into an issue, we know that it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to run that contingency scenario, where we left the queue to warm up and we're it fell. So we want to have a little bit of extra time. Thankfully, we didn't need it for that. But overall, the the test went through the tanking. It was it was really quiet and and went well, we did experience an issue with our comm system.

That was probably the most exciting thing that happened during the tanking scenario, but it wasn't related to the loading of cryogenic commodities. We didn't have the flight crew participating. We had them observing but not participating actively in the tests. In other words, they didn't go out to the pad, but we did send the close up crew out to the pad. And, they went through their timeline, their normal clothes out of the Orion crew module, the last hatch and the white room, all of that went part of the timelines.

And, and then we got into our terminal part of count. We resumed from our count at, at 832, we were targeted an 830 t0 initial t0. We were a little bit, behind that coming out. But again, really close to the opening of the window, we had a, planned hold. We were going to demonstrate that three minute, nine hole constraint.

We have never done that before. We did that yesterday, and we were successful in doing so. We held the clock at a minute 30, for the three minutes we picked up, we actually went a little bit over the three minutes we picked up and we counted down, and then we had a planned cut off, and we went through our recycle with the flight hardware, with a cryogenically fueled vehicle. Again, first time we've ever done that. Validate in our timelines.

We expected it to take about an hour a little over. We did in 57 minutes. So very pleased with how that all went in retargeting a second t0, we picked up, the count again at t -ten minutes and we counted down and we had no holds, no planned holds, and nothing held us up in term count. And we went down and had a cutoff at 29 seconds, which concluded the, the terminal part of the count. And then we got back into our recycle.

And this time, instead of retarget into t0, we got into our drain. And I'm happy to report that through those two different targets of T0, when we wrapped all that up, we still had launch window, remaining so very successful day and very proud of this team and all that they accomplished. To get us to yesterday and then to go execute with such precision and, with that I'll hand it over to John. All right. Thank John.

Obviously yesterday was really a really good day for us. I thought the test went extremely well. The entire team, really remained focused and vigilant, throughout the entire test. And that that includes the MMT. You know, when we when we did the test, three weeks ago, the hardware was talking to us, so we listened.

And as Charlie mentioned, the remediation activities that we, we took turned out really well. But again, no, it was just another opportunity for us to ring out the system and, and validate and verify that we've we've got it. We've got a good system in place. Before we put crew on on the launch vehicle, the rocket, to go fly on launch day, I thought, just kind of I had a little bit of time to, to reflect on the launch team and the MMT throughout the day. And I really felt like, we're getting to we've all gotten to a place where we've all where we want to be relative to how sharp we are and how we operate.

You know, it's you see, you see a lot of times relative to, our launch frequency. And so we had to work really hard through training activities for all of us to stay on, stay on edge, teams off looking at the data. I met with some of them this morning. So far away, I don't we don't have any indications of anything that that we're worried about, but we're just getting started. So we'll go through that and, see what the teams come up with and address those as needed.

But overall, it was a good day for us. Megan, back to you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much for those opening remarks.

It's really great to see how, we've learned from what trust to when we had a successful what dress learn from what dress won. And we had a successful address to. All right. So we are now going to invite reporters here in person, as well as over the phone to ask their questions. If you're on the phone, remember that you need to press star Q a star one to get into the queue and then wait for a mic to get to you here.

So we'll start over here. Marsha, go ahead. Marsha Denton Associated Press to meet a March 6th launch attempt. When would the flight readiness review need to be held? When would the crew be getting what other milestones between now and then do you have to, be on time for in order to make that the first time in March?

I'll speak to the, the programmatic part of that, and then I'll pass it over to Charlie to talk some of the the other big kind of technical things that we have to get done in this time frame. You mentioned, the flight readiness review. That's certainly a big one. It is, targeted for the end of next week. That should be in plenty of time, prior to, to launch to, to go through that certification of flight readiness.

It is going to be an extensive and detailed review. We are going to go over and comb every aspect of this system. And we'll go through that, with our associate administrator, armature tria. And I expect, our administrator will be paying very close attention as well, as we go through that certification process. And then at, launch minus two days, we hand over responsibility over to John Hunnicutt as the empty chair.

And as we prepare, for the launch readiness. You mentioned the the crew. The crew will go into what we call a soft quarantine, or we're calling a soft quarantine where they're going into quarantine at Johnson Space Center. Later today, as I mentioned. And then, probably at around l minus five days or more, that would be the latest, but it could go a little earlier.

They would, transition here to Kennedy Space Center to continue their quarantine up until launch. But I'm going to pass it to Charlie, and she can tell you about the the big technical milestones that we need to achieve. Well, really, we just have one big milestone left. We have contingency pad access that we are installing. So we got out of, got through our drain operations early this morning and got into a nerding.

We'll get back into the pad, probably somewhere around, you know, what time is it now? Maybe somewhere in the next hour or so. Certainly by the end of our shift today, we should have our teams back in. We're doing the preps for the lift, so we could be ready for that lift as soon as this evening. Once we get the, the platforms lifted up.

We have two of them. One of them that provides access to the entertaining and to the booster, and then another that provides, access just to the boosters will go in, will establish access. And those volumes. And then we go in and do the retest. And so that involves disconnecting ordnance, doing the retest, reconnecting ordnance back and out of those volumes.

So it's not a short, you know, 12 hours, amount of work. It spans several days. But that's really our big thing that we have left to do before launch. Getting through this wet dress was, an important milestone for us. Certainly, there's other work.

You know, we'll continue with our light snow and final preparations of the crew module. We have some lessons learned from yesterday that will go in and address. But in terms of the big work that's left, it it really is that contingency pad access and that feeds retest. Thank you. Okay, Phil.

Yes I think this is fairly, you mentioned the mini tanking, the hydrogen integrity test or whatever. You know, I think I'm speaking for a lot of reporters. We would not have known that was going on if we didn't ask somebody, which I don't understand. I mean, there's a lot of interest in all of this, and I don't understand why information is so hard to come by. I know you talked to us at these briefings and stuff, but it's like PA didn't have permission to tell us things.

That's number one. If you can just address that, because you are the launch director. And secondly, the seals you mentioned, you have to realize none of us have ever seen a picture or a drilling. We don't know where they are in the tail service or how it butts up against the rocket. And so if you're trying to describe something like that, it really helps to have some detail.

You don't have to give away company secrets and privacy. It's not it's it's you need a picture. You need some kind of description to understand it. So where are the seals? Get your picture okay.

Okay. Where are the seals? What kind of what did you see when you took the old seals out that made you confident new seals were going to fix that? And how are they arranged around the eight inch and four inch. Are they separate with separate lines in a cavity, or are they separate cavities?

How does that work? Sorry, it's all good. So I'll take a shot at it and then I'll, if John wants to add anything to it, I'll hand it over to him. So, and we we can absolutely get you some, some pictures to help out with it, but you have two different lines that go into the plate that forms the interface between the flight vehicle and the ground. And those plates come together.

And there are two if you've seen, if you're looking at that live shot at the pad, you'll see those, those two, there's two hoses that come off of the back of that plate. Two flex hoses. One is eight inch. It's for your fill in drain. The other is your four inch, which is your bleed.

Inside of that plate cavity, there's a seal that goes around where that interface, meets together. Pretty simple. Pretty simple look and seal and, and so what we did is that we went in and we changed both of those out in terms of findings. You know, we didn't have any significant findings when we went into Into the cavity. It wasn't like we saw something where we had a significant blemish on the seal, and we thought, this is absolutely, you know, the root cause are the witness to the leakage that we saw.

But the team work through the data. What we did find was there was seem to be after we removed the seal, there was a little bit of moisture in that, in that eight inch area, where it came from, I'm not entirely sure, but we found some moisture there. And certainly when you get cryogenic, temperatures going through there, you can have some freezing in that can cause an issue. We also found that there was a little bit on the four inch. There was a little bit of scratches on there, which we very easily buffed out.

Again, it's not indicative of the kind of leak that we saw. During wet dress number one, the scratches that we experienced. So when we, when we close up that cavity, we didn't have one thing that we could point to where we said this was absolutely. It. We had a number of contributing things, but certainly changing out the Seals, addressed the problem, because we had absolutely incredible performance yesterday.

And just real quick in pressurization for the last minutes when you press the tank. And that leak shot up during WDR one, how did it do this time? The maximum leak rate. Let me get that for you, because I actually, I knew you would ask me. It was like 1.

6%. 1. 5% was the highest that we saw, which, is really pretty impressive because if you recall, during Artemis Swan, even on our launch attempt, we saw about 6% in that cavity. Thank you. I will take one more on the room, will, and then we'll go to the phones.

Yeah, we'll Robinson Smith with Spaceflight now. Thanks for taking the time. Maybe to juxtapose the leak rate that you mentioned. Charlie just a second ago. You know, the the limit for WDR one was 16%.

But can you say what the maximum that you saw actually was, especially during, tank pressurization during that, terminal count. And then to, John Honeycutt in your, prepared remarks, you mentioned, you know, relative to the launch frequency, worked really hard, through training activities to stay on edge. I wonder in looking forward to it and maybe Lori Glaze, if you want to address this as well. Looking forward to Artemis three. How are you working to mitigate that and to make sure you stay sharp?

As you know, there's going to be whatever time there is between now and the launch of Artemis three. What sorts of activities are you doing to keep those skills sharp? And, you know, how soon can we expect to hear about the the crew training for Artemis three? Thanks. So I'll I'll answer the part.

Staying sharp and, kind of put words in Charlie Charlie's mouth. She does the same thing that I do with her launch team. Right. Just there. I think her forefathers that came before her, they were big on being vigilant about testing and staying sharp.

And so I've adapted that same philosophy for the MMT, so I, I know we'll continue to do that as after this mission, as as we approach our mystery thing. Thing you want to add, Lord, I think, you know, even, you know, John mentioned, that, even the, the, the team dynamic and how the team was working together yesterday. There were some improvements, over wet dress one in some of the prior, prior, trainings that we've done that they're really, really coming together. We've actually made some changes in how the, the MMT works, the structure of it and and by phase of the, of the mission and I think there's a lot of lessons there that we can take forward to Artemis three items. Three is going to be a complex mission, with multiple, phases and thinking about how we can make that MMT.

The most effective that it can be, to make, good decisions in a, in a quick time frame, but that are well informed and, take advantage of the insights from our, our bench depths down below the tactical depth. I think there's a lot of lessons that we've learned that, that we can take forward. You did ask about, you know, the Artemis three. When are we going to start thinking about a crew for Artemis three? There's still a lot of things that have to happen, before we're ready to.

To pick this. The specific crew that we need. We've got a lot of, general training that can go that is ongoing. That can happen before we're ready to pick that crew. But we won't pick the crew until we're where we have the specific, mission operations lined out.

And we can be assured that we're picking the right crew for the right mission. Okay, let's go to the phones for some questions. We have Irene Klotz. Go ahead. I mean.

The administrator has written something about redesigning this interface. Pardon is three at this point, do you think that that's necessary, or do you think you now, have, have this leak issue, handled for, for future missions and could you please discuss we're all we're all with you for early March, but if it doesn't work out, could you please discuss sub plan or launch options beyond, from what you've told us before, the early April in that window would not be available, due to the, battery checkouts. And I've tried for a month to get the rest of the window. That opens April 30th, to no avail. And echoing those comments about please bring your very good staff to tell us what they know.

Thank. Yeah. Go ahead, John, you go first. I'll, I'll take the the the seal part. So I think last time we got together, I told you about how tricky hydrogen was.

That small, small molecule, very energetic. And, it likes to find leak pass. We've seen that throughout history. This this team has worked very hard since Artemis one and knew we had work to do to get us into a place where we weren't having these problems. And I can promise you that they addressed everything that we could get addressed.

Yet we still ran into this. I would share with you that, the team still got some open legs on their fault today that they've been working, but I think they got some good data in this round. We'll have to see where that drives them in order to to answer the question. And, you know, if you recall, on Artemis one, we did the same thing. We changed the seals at the pad.

And we were successful. So here we are. Over the last three weeks, we changed the seals with the pad and we were successful. So again, the hardware is talking to us. I don't want to get ahead of the team.

I think they've got some theories about what's going on there. But we'll lift and drive closer. But, I do, know the administrator wants to make this leak proof, and I think we're on a good path. Get a good opportunity to do that. Okay.

Ken Chang, New York Times. Go ahead, Ken. All right. Simple question. When would you set a launch date with that?

You have to the flight readiness review. As I said, I think we are going to target the sixth. It's pending the successful, work at the pad. And the successful, certification of flight readiness, which I said it, we anticipate the end of next week. So I think we can keep an eye on those activities.

If something happens that pushes us off away from the six based on the experience that we're having or over the next week or so, we will certainly communicate, communicate that and be transparent about it. So, let's, let's all keep our eyes out. We'll, we'll be, I'm sure, posting regular blogs, updates on how we're doing with the contingency pad access and the work that's going to go on, with the flight termination systems in the booster and the inner tank area of the core stage. And, you know, if there's something there that looks like it could threaten the sixth, we will certainly, let everyone know that we could we could move off of that. But for right now, that's that's the direction that we're headed.

I think there was also the question earlier about other launch, availability, the later launch periods, in particular, I guess that would be, 20 launch period 20 that opens on April 30th and beyond. We'll certainly take that, comment, seriously and take a look at, if we're, if we've there's still a lot of analysis that has to go into those. And so the three launch periods that we released are the ones that have been analyzed most closely, where we understand the constraints. You know, we've talked before about all the various parameters that can impact the launch availability, including of, you know, thermal, thermal state of Orion, eclipses, communications constraints, the the heat shield that we've talked about previously. And so there's a lot of analyzes that need to go into determining exactly which of those dates, have appropriate, launch, windows or launch, yeah, launch windows within those, periods.

So if those are when those are ready, we'll make sure we get the, the additional, periods out. But, you know, if we're lucky, maybe we won't. We won't need those. Okay, we'll take one more on the, phone. Micah maiden, BRB, Wall Street Journal, and then we'll go to the room again.

Michael, go ahead. Hey. Good morning. Has the team conducted any analysis of the impact, if any, the weather may have had on the vehicles or ground systems? Just given some of the cold temperatures seen earlier.

Are you tracking anything there? Thanks. I can take you to. I, so we do not believe that the cold temperatures had an effect on the performance of the cavity. Just because the ambient conditions are, I'll say, so much kinder than the temperatures that are flowing through that interface.

But certainly we did see during the performance of the wet dress, we did see in some of our systems out at the pad that, we had some thermal effects from that. And, and so we have gone through and taken action on those. And by that, what I mean is that, you know, you have certain certain pneumatic systems that you set up based on ambient conditions, as we saw the fluctuation in temperature or some of those needed some adjustments. So, we did see that. But in terms of performance of that interface, we do not believe it was, an ambient condition related, issue.

Okay, let's come back in the room here. Can. Thank you, Ken Kramer. Space up close. First.

Congratulations. The spectacular. I was here last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. And and can't wait to go back to the moon. So I get a couple of questions.

Talking about, first John, the seals and the filters. So you replace them two times. What I'm wondering is, do you need or would you consider replacing them again, or are you going to use the seals and the filters that are in place now? And I also want to ask, To back up Bill's comments. I've asked for a reentry trajectory.

Okay. There's one for Artemis. One I've asked a couple times for Artemis two, if you could if you could make that available. Okay. And with a little explanation.

You know, we've heard general terms, but I'd like to hear some details why it is better, compared to Artemis one, you're not doing the skip reentry. You know, give us some details about. That would be extremely helpful. Thank you. Let's see.

So the seals in the filter are two separate issues. We ran into the filter problem on the during the confidence test. The eggs folks in the filters on the, on the skid, on the email. And so Charlie's team, went through that part. So I'll let her describe that.

I think right now, as always, if we ran into a challenge on the Seals, we would look at the data and make a decision about what the next steps would be. I will tell you right now, I got I got a pretty high level of confidence in the configuration that we're in right now. It's out there at the pad. It's going to be there at the pad until we go fly. Very little influences can go on to change the configuration we're in right now.

You know, talk about filter. Sure. And I would agree with John. There would be no, no plan to go change the Seals. We had great performance yesterday and, and there would be no reason to go relook at those in terms of the filter.

John said it. It's on the Kraus skid that's on the mobile launcher and, and so what happened during the confidence test is that we saw a Delta P, across that filter that we didn't expect. And it was right around the time that we were transitioning to fast fill. So what we were left with was did we have something that was clogged in the filter? Was the filter frozen?

What caused that? And so we went in and we had to wait a couple of days for it to warm up, get it up to the right temperatures, because the last thing you want to do in a crowd system is introduce moisture. And, and so we went in, pulled that filter out. What we found was that it wasn't clogged. So we were left with there's no debris in it.

And and so it was likely some air that got ingested into the system somewhere. And it froze, as part of those operations. So we parked it out, put it in a brand new filter, and continued our purges and again, had really good performance yesterday. We would have no plan to go in and touch that again. You know, one of the things that kind of systems is one of the ways you can actually have problems is when you open them up, it's safer to keep them buttoned up.

Yeah. You know, they're working. This technical community works closely together. I got to give kudos to, the ULA folks and and some other folks that stepped in and worked with the guys and Celeste guys to share, some of their learnings relative to, Frozen or nitrogen? Frozen nitrogen or frozen air in their filters.

And they had seen it. They had seen it before, too, in that they provided some valuable data to help drive this thing to closure. I'll address the question about the Artemis two trajectory. Thank you for the comment. We'll see what we can do.

Getting you some information there. Some more detailed information. The I wouldn't say, that the Artemis two trajectory is, is, you know, in any way a better trajectory than Artemis one? It's different, and it's uniquely designed specifically for, the Orion heat shield capabilities that we have for Artemis two. It's also uniquely, designed based on this free return trajectory that we have.

So it's not an entry, profile that we would use on, for the Artemis three mission, for example. That's in orbit around the moon and then coming back to Earth. It is something that we have the ability because we're on this free return, we can use a specific trajectory that allows us to come in and manage those, heat loads. On the Artemis two heat shield, which we, we believe we now, on all of the work that's been done since Artemis one, understand what we expect the performance of that heat shield to be. Specifically, we will make changes to the heat shield for our industry.

In fact, it's already built. It's, sitting over in the OMC building right now. So, this is a unique trajectory, and, it's it's specific for this mission. But I do take your point and we'll see if we can get you some more detail on that. Thank you.

Thank you know that that's a different just unique for sure. It's unique just to Artemis two. We won't use this type of trajectory again when we have the more capable heat shield. Oh, sorry. Ken, do you mind if we have a couple of other people online as well?

Do you mind? We'll try to get back around to you, we promise. All right. Megan, over there. First of all, congratulations.

Megan Moriarty with Wesh two here. First and foremost, what? I guess specifically for Charlie. What kind of emotions were you feeling at 10:16 p. m.

last night? And how confident are you for a march launch date? And then for just for logistics purposes, besides March 6th, what are some of the other, dates that we could possibly see this launch? All right, so how did I feel last night? I felt great, the team had worked really hard.

We had had some challenges in Artemis one, and, you know, our, SLS chief engineer and my friend John Blevins often says you have to you have to earn your right to fly. And I felt like last night was a big step in us earning our right to fly. So, felt really good. Very proud of the team because, you know, they, continue to work through the challenges, whether it was in the integrity test, whether it was in, the wet dress and all of this really does prepare you to fly. You know, John talked about how the team executed and all of that.

You know, I would say that proficiency and execution and, timelines, the way that they've matured, the procedures, all of that, was reflected last night. And it's all a testament to the work that the that the team did to be ready for that. So I felt really good about it. Good about the task, proud of the team. How do I feel about March 6th?

I mean, is Laurie talked about it. You know, we have to get through the flight readiness review. We got work ahead of us, but certainly, as I told our team during the, the pretest briefing for wet dress, you know, we have two big jobs ahead of us. One was a successful wet dress and meeting our, test objectives for that. And, you know, during Artemis one, we left a few of those on the table, and we still made a successful run at launch, even though there was a few of those we didn't demonstrate last night.

We demonstrated them all. So, that gives me great confidence in going into launch countdown relative to how to load the vehicle, the performance of the seals, the performance of the team kind of things you might see in term count. Let's see. And then the other work that's ahead of us is the contingency pad access that I talked about. That is the first time up at the pad.

So we haven't done that before. It's a new capability we developed for Artemis two specific to providing a retest of the flight termination system at the pad. If you recall, for on this one, we roll back, to retest that. That's where we have access in the VAB. So we have these, these two access trusses that we install on the mobile launcher provides temporary access out to those, compartments so that we can access the ordnance and we can go retest it.

So, I will have you a much better answer on how that goes, once we get into the work. But, that is really the last remaining thing other than just, you know, button and everything, getting into your final configuration for launch. So I feel I feel pretty good about that. Yeah, we have, I believe our launch window goes through the 11th, so. Yeah, six, seven, eight, nine and 11.

And that's online. Exactly. Can I just add one more? Just quick note to follow, Charlie, we've talked a lot about what we've learned through the wet dress rehearsal and where, our levels of confidence in getting to the launch. But I did just also want to stress this continues to be this is a flight test.

The whole mission is still a flight test. This is our second time to fly the SLS and Orion systems. The first time with crew, the first time with, the environmental control systems active, the first time with the flight termination systems active so that we can support crew. So I just want to keep people, you know, in your mind, you know, we're talking about how confident we are in getting to launch and our excitement about this mission. But I don't want anybody to ever lose sight of the fact that this is a flight test and the entire mission, we will continue to learn.

That's the whole point of this mission, is to learn. Okay. We'll take one more in the room here before going on the phones. Thank you. I teach you mascara with the Epoch Times.

Thank you so much. And again, congratulations. Can you elaborate a little more on, what? Work the closeout crew still has to do. And, and talk about all the, the changes that were made, from, what, just 1 to 1?

Just to thank you. So for the closeout crew, we did deploy them to the pad yesterday. We wanted to demonstrate the close out of the Orion crew module, and all of our procedures we didn't have. I wouldn't say we had any significant changes in the plans. Other than you may recall.

There were some, I'll say some minor things that we wanted to to go take a look at, in terms of and some of them are very small. Right. We had, and one simple one. Right. The elevators on the two 74ft level.

We have blast doors up there. Those doors were closed out, for when the closeout crew arrived at the pad. Normally, those are left open so that when the elevator doors open, you can walk right out onto 74. Said that during wet dress, one kind of held us up for a few minutes while they configured the doors. That's a simple thing, but those are the that set of simple things that on launch day can cost you sometimes minutes, that matter.

And so we wanted to go back through and do our closeout one more time. The, the closeout crew performed, amazing. They deployed to the pad. They were right on their timelines. We didn't have any significant issues.

As part of the closeout activities, we do plan to do one more demo, before flight just because, you know, John talked about the, you know, our launch rate and talked about the opportunities to to go through and do training. And in the case of the closeout crew, there isn't a full trainer anywhere that gives you the crew module hatch and, and the last hatch and the white room. And so we where we get that is, is in the white room with the flight hardware. So we do intend to do one more closeout demo, just, to refine our timelines and look at it one more time. But I don't envision any significant changes as a result.

Team did great yesterday, right. Thank you for that question. We'll go on the phones now. Marcia Smith, space policy online. Thanks so much for taking my question.

Questions. Actually, I think I have two of them for Laurie. The first one is about, comment you made a little bit earlier about for Artemis three, and you wouldn't be picking the crew. There's you had to pick the right crew for the right mission. And could you elaborate on that a little bit?

And does that reflect questions about which human landing system you're going to be using, and is there any update on that and near-term for Artemis two, I'm wondering what NASA's strategy is for getting the word out to the public about are the two, because I'm still surprised at how many people don't even know that we're going back to the moon. I'll take your, your first question first. Yes. So, as you know, we are, we have been over the last several months, thinking about trying to introduce a little bit more of a competitive nature and in trying to get our crew to the lunar surface. And so we are, looking at potential, you know, the potential of having either the, the starship or the, the Blue Origin, lander, capability, landing capability.

So that will make a difference in training. We, and then also just even as we refine, the work that we want to do on the lunar surface, that will also define exactly, what types of capabilities that we need, the complement of capabilities that we're going to need, with that crew. So that's, that's kind of where, where we are, what's going to drive, drive the selection. So I would anticipate, you know, over the next many months or year or so, starting to really refine and think through, what that will look like. So stay tuned.

On that. Let's see the the first question had to do. I'm sorry, what was the first one on. The second question on the Artemis two. How would you get people to oh, get the people to know about it more.

Yes. Well, am I, yes, I agree, we need we need to start getting the word out. Let's let's do that. I'm going to rely on you guys to help us a lot. In in getting the news out and getting the story out, and, NPO folks as well, and hopefully, by, leaning in a little harder on when we think we really anticipate, our ability to launch, hopefully in March.

I think that that helps a lot as well, where it's not an ambiguous time in the future. We've had the successful, wet dress rehearsal yesterday. I think a lot of folks, up to this point have said, you know, we watched Artemis one and it went, you know, significantly beyond when we first started talking about it. But this is really getting real, and it's time to get serious and start getting excited. All right, next question on the phone, Jeff Foust.

Space news. Good morning. Quick question on the leak rates that you measured. Was that that low week rate, that 1. 5% or so constant throughout the test from from fueling through the terminal count down?

Or were there points in the test that that leak peaked? And is that providing any sort of diagnostics about what might have been the root cause of, of the issues you were having earlier? Thanks. Yeah. So no, it was not, constantly grade.

In fact, I don't have the I just had the max, leak rate for during our FIL operations, and it was, I'm going to say this, 0. 4% was our max in, fast fail, 0. 4%. So, that is almost unheard of. Even in Artemis one, we did not see leak rates that low.

The, leak rate in term count we saw was, in the first run through term count, we had 1. 6% was the highest we saw. And, in our second one, it was, 0. 7, and, it was not constant the whole time, because what happens in term count is that we're going through something called pre-press. And so you have these, pressurization pulses that, that are being sent to pressurize the flight tank.

And so you could see that you'll see some fluctuation in that leak rate. But the numbers that I gave is the max that we saw, during that time. So, again, very good performance yesterday. CNN. Hi, folks.

Thanks for doing this. Couple questions. First for, Charlie about the Seals. What's what's the difference between the Seals, that you just put on versus the one that were replaced? You know, if I understand correctly, these work with the chill down.

So what makes you confident that these seals, you know, won't continue to work, with chilled out on launch day? And then question for whoever can take it. I know that there was an indication that you could work towards an earlier launch date than March 6th. I think March 3rd was kicked around. Can you discuss why you were able to evaluate launch dates that weren't previously identified and why you ultimately decided to stick with March 6th?

And are you going to continue to consider maybe alternative launch days down the line, or is it pretty much set to these that you've previously identified now? Thanks so much. Yes. I'll take the first part of the I don't own the seals. There's no difference.

The seals are exactly the same. They're just newer seals. All I can say about that is, is, you know, these seals are installed when we build the core stage, up in the VAB is Charlie mentioned earlier, and as you know, we're in the VAB for pretty good while because we got a lot of work to do there. And then we go through rollout and, and we understand, that we do have certain loads on the, on the rocket as we roll to the pad. And so I'm not going to speculate anymore.

What I said earlier is we're going to let the teams go off and look at the data that we got over this over the day yesterday and see how that addresses things that we might need to do different moving down the road or maybe, maybe we just look at operationally if we do something different. And I'll take the question about the, additional potential launch opportunity dates. So as I mentioned, a little bit earlier when we were talking about other potential windows, or launch periods beyond April, there's an enormous amount of analyzes that has to go in to, determination of which of the which of those dates, actually have, appropriate launch windows that we can use that are, you know, we want something that's in general, at least two hours, in duration so that we can, have a good chance of getting off with on that date. And then all of the constraints I mentioned, thermal control, eclipses for power, communications. And so what, what we had done, with March 3rd, which we had been looking at, is that the preliminary analysis, was kind of on the edge.

And so it was originally taken off of the plate, and we already knew that the fourth and the fifth were not viable at all for some of those reasons. And so there wasn't a whole lot of, the additional work wasn't really done on third on the third. But, we started really sharpening our pencils, trying to maximize the number of days. Can we eke out, could we eke out another day in March that could be viable? And so that in particular, the Orion team went off and started looking at it, and looking at not just the, the nominal case and the baseline case, but they have to look at all of the off nominal cases, all of the potential scenarios that that we might end up in, and how the Orion spacecraft would, would still be able to perform, keep our crew safe, and be able to return back to Earth, in a, in a safe configuration.

And so that took an enormous amount of work, but they went and they did that. They did all of that, additional analyzes. They ultimately did determine that the third could have been a viable date. But the work that we had ahead of us, it it it just didn't seem feasible. If particularly following Wet dress one and considering the work that needed to be done, with replacing the seals and replacing the filter, and so we, we opted to eliminate that, as a, as an available date.

But I anticipate, as we go through the, the systematic approach that we have for assessing each of the viable or the available launch dates. We'll go through those. We already have, I believe a rough cut at those for, for May and June and beyond. But we'll continue to refine those. And as I said earlier, as we as we sharpen our pencils and we start to get a better understanding of exactly which of those dates are available, we'll make those available to you guys as well.

We're saying on the phones, we have quite a bit there. Steven Clark, Ars Technica. Hi, thanks for taking my question. I don't I think I just answered my my main question, but I'll follow up, on the seals, what are the seals made of? What material?

And, remind me, was there any difference between, third design change made in the seals themselves between Artemis one and to, that's for for John, I guess. And for Charlie. We heard some things. You mentioned the comms issue during the countdown and also the, booster avionics issue that came up during the terminal count, I guess yesterday. Can you kind of just go over, you know what the path forward is on resolving those?

Thanks. So it's a metallic ring that that fits between the two interfaces in the metallic rings. Has the sealing, material built up on it. It's Teflon, and then it's kind of a complex geometry to the spring because it's got, it's got as a spring assist feature to it all around, all around the seal. And then even, I believe it's the four inch seal is actually a pressure assisted seal.

So. But no, there's been no change since Artemis one in the design. Okay. Joey Roulette, Reuters. I had a quick question on the communications issues that was mentioned earlier on this call.

I know it's not an exciting thing that happened, but I'm just curious to know what was causing that, what the fix was, what the situation is there. Thank you. Yes, I can take that. We did experience a, communications issue yesterday. We were able to track it down to a, network configuration issue.

And so we've been able to take corrective actions to ensure that we don't have that happen again. One thing I'll also say is that we were able to go through while it wasn't planned to demonstrate yesterday, we did go through, a contingency procedure that we run in the event that we have a loss of calm. And, we implemented that yesterday. It worked great. The only, slight hold up that we had was, when the comm issue, we encountered it, it was just as we were getting ready to take hydrogen from slow fill to fast fill.

And, I did ask the team to hold up. I didn't want to go too fast. Fill, until we had, stable comm. Just because in the event that we were to have something happen, I wanted to make sure that we could communicate across our team. But we do have a contingency plan that involves, test nets on our radios, that we utilize.

And so we did go through and deploy those yesterday in the firing room. And we were able to to keep communication with our team, while the, the comm network team was able to go troubleshoot and isolate the, the problem, and get us back to stable. Okay. Cool. From the Canadian broadcast company is on the phone.

Go ahead and call. Actually, that was my question. I was going to ask about the, comms issue. But, I mean, you seem pretty confident that this won't creep up again. I'm asking because this also occurred during, the first attempt with Artemis one.

Had you changed anything since then with comms? An issue like this during Artemis one? I do not recall any issues that we had like this with the communication system during Artemis one. We had a different comms system, during Artemis one than the one that we have in place today. And, I don't I don't recall any, communication issues during Artemis one.

Okay, let's see, there are new hands in the room because we still have quite a bit on the phone. We'll go here. And then we'll go back to the phones. I, verdict with the National Space Society. A question for a John.

At the pre rollover press conference, you mentioned the enormous responsibility of the MMT and that we're not going to be going to we're ready. We've made a lot of progress since then. I'm just wondering, as we're moving toward launch, what will you be looking at specifically? Is there anything that maybe, concerns you or is keeping you up at night? No.

Are you talking relative to the MMT or the hardware to the MMT? Yeah. So, you know, we did talk we looked at it. And I think the leadership leadership above me agreed at some point in time in this, path today, we needed to do more to get ready. I feel like at this point we have demonstrated, a significant amount of improvement to where I am almost happy.

And, I may not ever be happy. I don't know, but I'll tell you, we got, we have another sim, in space SIM planned at JSC for the MMT on Monday. And then, you know, knock on wood, we want it. We want to go fly as soon as we can in the launch window. But if if something opens up there and God forbid that to happen, I'll be looking at all of the things we can go do to stay sharp.

All right. We have time for two more on the phone. Tariq Malik, Space. com. This, thank you very much, Charlie.

You mentioned that during this fueling test, the, the Artemis two crew, you know, they weren't participating, but that they were observing. And I'm just curious kind of what, what their, reactions or their, their input was that you've got after the fact about what they, what they're thinking now that we've passed this milestone, and that you're, you've got March 6th on the horizon. Yeah. So, yeah, we were really lucky to have our flight crew in the firing room. Three of the four members observing the test.

And, to say, I would say that they were excited to be there with the team and, and and pretty pleased with all the results. So, you know, I wouldn't want to put words in their mouth, but, I think they were, as happy or maybe happier than I was. And I was certainly thrilled with the results I read, Reid said in, in the MMT bubble, with us. And he in particular, he said, right next to the moon team, our chief engineer. And, he stayed right there through to the whole time.

And, Reid made the same observation that I made earlier today. He's he's been either directly tracking or indirectly tracking how this what this team's doing to improve. And he saw that and he noted it, to me after we finished the test. So he reflected on the launch team and the MMT. All right.

Andrea Lynn Felder, Houston Chronicle, you have the last question of this press briefing. Go ahead. I, thank you. I wanted to ask another question about the communications. I recall there were communication blackout during the first wet dress rehearsal for the Artemis two mission.

And there was an alert, news update that said it had been an ongoing issue. So is there a larger issue with the communications? And, you know, did go into the contingency contingency plan yesterday, provide confidence that, you know, that plan would work on launch day if there was another communications issue. Thank you. So we did have we did have a, a comm issue during wet dress one.

And, you know, there's been like many, like, many communication issues, just a reflection of technology, if you will. That can happen for a lot of different reasons. And so the team has been working very diligently to determine as we go through each of them, and not all of them are the same. Sometimes it is related to, some of the comm issues can be related to, you know, some configuration between centers. And so you may have heard that we had some of that in one of our wet dress, where we had some of our loops that weren't, weren't connected, in the way that we expected, which is why we do wet dress so we can figure out all these things.

So on launch day that we get all this configuration, and all of this mapping correctly. And so that was one form of the, the comm issues that we've had. We've also had we had another issue, on a prior test where we, we dropped out of what was called duplex to simplex, mode within the server, which is that the comm essentially worked just fine, but the redundancy wasn't there. And so you may have heard us speak about that. Yesterday's issue was something completely different.

It wasn't within the voice comm system itself, but it was in the network. So hopefully as we have worked our way through this, pinpointing each and every one of these root causes and correcting them, hopefully on launch day, we don't see this. We'll certainly be putting operational controls in place as well for once we get our config in place and freezing it, once we test it out. So there'll be some operational controls that, that come along with that. And was there another part to the o our backup plan.

So, you know, because we had some issues before we wanted with Wet dress one, we wanted to make sure that we had, you know, one of the things that that, I think NASA does really well is we, you know, we learn from the data that we're given. And, and then you try to take that and you apply it and you think about, well, what could the next failure be and how would we address that? And so we had a comm issue. We thought about you know, we went and corrected the issue that we had, and then we thought about, well, what if this happened and what if it happened in the most dynamic state, and what would we do and how would we address that? And that's where the contingency plan came, came up.

We had that procedure. So it wasn't something we were doing yesterday. We had, radios available in the firing room. We had people designated that would be available to provide those as they were needed. We knew what channels we would use.

It was all in, in our procedures. And so while I hope to not, execute that on launch day, I certainly know that if we need to, that it is available to us. And I do have it. I know you said that was our last question, but I want to go back because I didn't answer. I think between the multiple questions, it got missed.

But, someone asked about the issue that stopped us in terminal count because we always planned to count down and hold that a minute. 30 we did not plan to have an issue. We did have an issue which was, booster powered 001, which looks at three sets of it basically looks at three measurements. Two of them are from the ground and one is from the booster, on board, battery. And it's just making sure that we have the right, voltage, to support the, the mission.

And so what happened is that the flight measurement looked great. It was solid. And we saw a delta to the, between what the ground side was seeing. So, we're going to go take a look at that. It was no constraint to yesterday.

We're not going to fly. And so we knew that we're in a good position to press on. We did that. But we will be going and looking into that and figuring out why we saw that delta between the ground, and, and the flight certainly between the two. You want your flight, measurement to be sound because that's the one you're going to go fly with.

The ground is going to be left behind. But, but we'll go work that out and figure that one out. But that was the issue someone asked about that stopped us in term count yesterday. Thank you so much for the follow up. Charlie, as you can see, we try to get to as many of you and as many of your questions as possible.

But we do have to wrap up today's news conference. Now, again, thank you so much for your questions. And thank you, of course, to Lori, Charlie and John here. And as you heard them say, we are going to target our 1st March opportunity, March 6th, pending any open work. But ahead of that attempt will, of course, host more of these briefings so that you can stay up to date on our progress.

But until then, everyone can learn more about this mission by going to nasa. gov/artemis for pulling that up on the screen right now. Again, NASA. gov slash Artemis again. Thank you everyone for your interest, for your questions and have a great rest of your day.

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