Artemis II: L-3 Countdown Status News Conference - 4K

From left to right, Rachel Kraft, NASA communications; Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate; Shawn Quinn, program manager, Exploration Ground Systems; Chris Cianciola, deputy manager, NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) Program; and Howard Hu, manager, Orion Program, participate in a news conference on Sunday, March 29, 2026, to discuss the upcoming Artemis II test flight at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 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 aboard NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft from Launch Complex 39B no earlier than 6:24 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 1.

What is said in the film

This is a live view of the Artemis two rocket and spacecraft at the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Today, we'll discuss how progress towards launch and the mission are going. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Rachel Kraft with NASA communications, and I'm joined this afternoon by several NASA managers to talk to you today about how our progress towards launch are going. They are.

Doctor Lori Glaze, Acting Associate Administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. Shawn Quinn, Exploration Ground Systems Program Manager. Chris Cianciola, Deputy Program Manager for the SLS program. And Howard Hu, Orion Program Manager. We'll have some opening remarks from each of our participants today, and then we'll take questions, both from reporters here in the room and those on the phone.

For those who are joining us by phone today, a reminder that you can join the question queue by pressing star one. And with that, we'll start with Lori. Great. Thank you. So much, Rachel.

And thank you to everyone that's tuned in and here today, for helping us share in this incredible excitement of the Artemis two launch. We are getting very, very close. And and we are ready. You know, we held our flight readiness review a couple weeks ago, and since that time, all of our operations have been going very smoothly. It's been going very well.

Our flight systems are ready. The ground systems are ready. Our launch and operations teams are ready. And our flight operations team in Houston are also ready. The crew arrived yesterday, and I know that they're ready.

They are more than ready. They can't wait to get off the ground. It was really terrific to see them, to see the crew arrive in Florida, where they'll be spending the next few days, doing their final reviews of their procedures, and spending some time with their families while they, remain in quarantine. Tomorrow, tomorrow, our mission management team, will become the primary decision makers, regarding our readiness for launch. The team, the MTP team, will be meeting in the afternoon tomorrow.

To review the closure plan for the few open item. Work, open work items that came out of the flight readiness review, to help ensure that we're ready to go. Before we go on today, I did want to just pause, and take a moment to make sure I thank all of the personnel who have put in thousands of work, thousands of hours of work over the last few months, including nights, weekends, holidays, to get us to this point. We help them and their incredible dedication to this mission. We wouldn't be here today.

I also want to thank our program managers, that are with us here. They have been overseeing a tremendous amount of work, within their teams to prepare for Artemis two. But not only to prepare the the hardware and the personnel for Artemis two, but they're now also at the same time, helping to ensure that we're ready for the increased cadence of the Artemis missions that are to come. And so that we are ready for this increased cadence and the new flights that will begin in next year. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Sean Quinn for eggs.

Thank you very much, Lori. Well, first of all, it's great to see everyone and I appreciate all your interest in what we do now. This week has already started to be an incredible week with the arrival of our, Artemis two flight crew. You know, as they were pulling up in the airplanes, we could actually see the moon in the daylight. And it was just.

It was really, really cool. Yesterday we had an important meeting. Our launch countdown. Pretest briefing. This is like, the last step before we get into the actual launch countdown, which will start tomorrow afternoon.

And I will tell you that it was one of the cleanest launch countdown pretest briefings we've ever had. And Charlie Blackwell Thompson, our launch director, commented to me that, you know, in all the years that she participated in shuttle launch countdowns, I've never had one that was as clean as this one, meaning we had no significant open work. All of our nonconforming SES were closed. And, the team and the ground systems are absolutely ready to get in the launch countdown. The one thing we are watching is the weather.

And we got our latest forecast from the, launch weather office officer from the space launch, Delta 45. And the thing we're watching is, cumulus clouds. The thick cloud rule and also, winds. So right now we're forecast to be 80% go, on on, Wednesday afternoon. So that's good.

So the last time we met, you know, we said, hey, we need to get out to the pad around, the 19th, and, we did. We held the schedule, and it was the shortest, pad turnaround we've ever had. Or pad to VAB to pad turnaround time we've ever had. It was, 21 days. Our previous, record was probably around 39 or 40.

In that time, we not only, changed the batteries out of their flight termination system, but we also made two repairs, with the, the helium two we talked about last time and also a harness on the flight termination system. Since that time at the pad, we've extended our crew access arm, we've installed our emergency egress systems, we've installed, extensible columns on the on the base of the mobile launcher. And we've retracted origin service platform. Our launch countdown teams. You know, today was, interestingly enough, was planned to be a weather day.

And, turns out the weather was not so good today. Well, since we were so far ahead in all of our launch countdown preps, we were able to give the team some time off today, and they've taken advantage of that. So, getting in the launch countdown, we've checked out our crowd systems, our to unlock systems, and all those tests have passed. We've done radio frequency tests with our, launch vehicle and the spacecraft, and that went very well. And, so we're we're really ready.

We're going to start our launch countdown around 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. We'll finish some pad washdown, some mobile launcher wash downs, and we'll get on with it. So at this point, we can safely say the crew's ready. The rocket's ready. Spaceship's ready.

Ground systems are ready, and we only need to have the weather cooperate on Thursday, and we're ready to go. So with that, I'll turn it over to Cassie. All right. Sean. Thank you.

We, too are incredibly excited to be here. This is our first opportunity to launch humans to deep space in more than 53 years. You think about the last mission completed, for humans in deep space in December of 1972. I do appreciate your interest, and I'm happy to be here to represent the SLS program. On behalf of manager David Beeman and the entire SLS team.

Our teams are working hard to get the rocket ready. You've heard Sean talk about all the work that's gone over in the last 3 or 4 weeks, but the energy and dedication of the team is truly electric. Everybody's excited. Now, we all recognize the historical significance of this mission, but our teams are still focused on making sure the rocket is fully prepared and ready to go. That is our focus.

Since the rollout was complete on the 20th, the teams have worked, to make sure that the connection email and the pad infrastructure are correct. The vehicle is talking to the pad, talking to the systems, and everything is coming along good. And like, Sean said, everything seems to be going well between the vehicle and the pad. We have completed all our, ordnance checks on our flight termination systems. That all went well.

That was a critical safety milestone for us. And tomorrow marks the start of our launch countdown. And we'll be working with the same persistence, as we've done all along. Make sure this rocket is ready. Our number one goal is to make sure that the crew remain safe.

That is our highest priority, and that is our unwavering commitment. And we will be there to support the crew until we see boots back on the on the ship. Well. Deck ship. So with that, I'm going to pass it to Howard.

All right. Thanks, Chris. I am also very excited to be here with you and, representing the entire Orion team. You know, we've worked very hard to get to this point. I'll tell you that, certainly.

You know, we've had our share of work that we need to get done. And when we roll back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, we powered on, and, we we didn't have anything, that we need to fix. We did top off our launch abort system. Battery. But there are no issues that we're working to right now.

So from our perspective, our spaceship is ready to go in. Fly. Read Victor, Jeremy and Christina to the moon and back. I would say that, it's part of normal processing that, we have final, items that we'd load. For example, the cruise laptop.

We're going to have that loaded as part of standard. Last, last second to last minute. Set of hardware that we would get on board. We'll I'll bring forward the batteries for the cameras, etc.. So nothing, unique.

Very much standard, processing that we need to do to prepare for the mission. And of course, tomorrow night at around 8:00, our, mission evaluation room team, that's the experts that we have to support. The flight control team will be, on station and starting the launch countdown process. They'll be ready to go. This team is comprised of all the experts across the program, from both our, U.

S. team and our European team. And they work hand-in-hand with our flight control team to make sure that, we tackle any, issues that may arise, during the mission and support, the flight control team in terms of decision making and understanding of anything that goes on. So that team is ready to go and really excited. And happy to be getting to this point in our, launch countdown sequence.

Of course. You know, after, Chris and, Celeste team, gives us a beautiful ride, into space. We've got a lot of things that, we're looking forward to in the first 24 hours. We've got, paired reraise maneuver. We've got, apogee raise, burn.

And of course, we've got our approximately operations demonstration with the ISPs, and it's really awesome. Time, in terms of just from, from the old guidance, navigation control, background to see all that happen. And then, of course, along the way, during the mission, we're going to be able to check out our first time systems with the life support systems and our displays and controls and our team. As I said, our mission evaluation room team will be monitoring and looking at all the data very closely and ensuring that all systems are working before we, commit to the moon through our, trans lunar burn. So that's going to be a very, important time frame, a very exciting time frame.

We're looking forward to seeing what the spacecraft is telling us and operating in that relevant space environment. You know, I would say that, as I said earlier, that the team is, certainly poised and ready to support, the mission. They're very excited. We've worked many years of testing, verification, validation, and of course, final checks of the systems over the last several months to ensure that we're ready to go. And, on behalf of the entire Orion program team comprised of, experts from the U.

S. and from our European partners. We're excited for this mission. We're ready to go. And we look forward to, successful, almost ten day, mission around the moon and back.

So thank you. All right. It's time now for questions. We will start here in the room and then go to the phone. A reminder for those on the phone.

You can press Star one to get into the question queue, if you don't mind limiting it to one question apiece. And, let us know who you'd like to answer that question. And with that, we'll start here in the front row with Marsha Dunn. Hello, Marsha Knapp, probably for you, Lori. NASA's just rolled out this big moon base plan, and it seems to me that that puts extra pressure, extra attention, so much extra on Artemis two to do.

Well. What's your take on that? I mean, I'm not perfect, but like, so much is riding on this mission now that perhaps wasn't before. Could you talk about that? You got Marsha.

I think there's always been a lot riding on this mission on Artemis two. We've always recognized from the beginning that the future of the Artemis program. The first major step with crew is the Artemis two mission. You know, we completed Artemis one. We demonstrated our sales capabilities, but Artemis is two, where we're really testing out the capabilities of the Orion system.

Environmental controls. There's always been a lot riding on this mission, but what I can tell you is that the rollout of the the moon base plan and the ideas for the accelerated launch cadence, in my opinion, have actually energized our teams. I think our teams are so excited to see an opportunity to not have to wait several years before the next mission. They are what I see, driven now to how can we work to achieve this amazing, launch cadence that allows us to keep our learnings and turn them around quickly, and build the muscle memory we've been talking about. So from what I see, it's more of an energizer than anything.

All right. Second roll. Bill Harwood and Bill are with CBS news for Howard. You know, making the first flight with a complete life support system puts an awful lot on the plate. That has to work for that.

During that first 25 hours before the the earned. Can you give us a sense of what gives you confidence that that system's going to work the way you want it to in the environment of space? Just based on the testing you've done on the ground and and the legacy systems that are involved. Just just overall confidence. Oh, that's going to work, right.

Because obviously it has to if you're going to go to the moon. Yeah. So, Bill, I would answer, just like all our primary systems and all the systems on spaceship, we do a lot of testing, uniquely for life support. We put actually humans with the life support system, both, in the cabin, environment and also in the spacesuits. And, we've been designing the system since the very beginning, the program in over the last decade plus, we've been doing testing across the board, with, suits and with the environmental control systems in the cabin and with subject, human subjects.

We have, vacuum chamber in at Johnson Space Center that allows us to do that. So that's one part of it in terms of the final kind of check out with people. But along the way, just like any other hardware we do, we tested the the individual box level. We tested the harness and connector level. And then we also tested integrated system.

You can imagine it in a pallet. And of course we do the spacecraft checkout as well. So there's all varying, steps that we take and increased fidelity by which we do this testing and that testing includes the actual flight software that controls, some of that ECUs, hardware, life support hardware, that we need. So, very robust test campaign comprised of, not only just components, integrated systems and with people. Okay.

We'll come here. Second row on Grush. Hi. Loren Grush with Bloomberg. I'm just wondering, do we know at this point the distance that they will come within the moon if they launch on April 1st?

How does that change throughout the April window? And if it does change, will they still be breaking the distance record for human crew things? Great question. Maybe I don't know how or do you know the at the top of your head, but the distances. I'll just call these numbers because we're doing the math on it right now.

252,799 mile statue miles, on April 1st. So that'll be the farthest point, that we're going on the moon. And, of course, we're going to be, 4144 statue miles further than the Apollo, has ever gone. So in terms of distance, we're working that on the second, third and fourth. I would say, let's launch on the first and, go from there.

Okay. But we are doing the calculations and, if you Loren, if you need those numbers, our teams are working on it very hard. Yeah. Let's go. Third row.

Hi. Thanks for doing this. Lori, you mentioned that there's still a couple of close out items from that far. Can you remind us what those are and where those stand? And then I also wanted to ask about.

I mean, we talked about ground forecasts. Really curious about in space weather forecasts. I know you guys are working with NOAA, to kind of crunch those numbers, but they're kind of difficult to predict. I just would love if someone could speak to, you know, how those conversations are going and and what you're prepared for if there is, you know, space weather event. So I'll see if I can remember off the top of my head with the items were, the one thing that we held for we had one item that had to be closed in time for the L minus two, and that item was working with our medical teams, with, chief medical officer, looking at, other countries around the world where if we had an emergency abort and we landed in different seas, and we needed to use medical facilities that were nearby and some of those other countries, it was working with those countries to make sure we had the right agreements in place.

And I believe those are getting close to closure. They will be closed by tomorrow. And so that will that's the intent there. Some of the other items were, really a constraint to rollout. And so those have all been closed before we rolled to the pad.

I'm trying to remember what they all were, and I can't remember from the top of my head. Shawn, you may remember what some of us are, our comm systems. We've had some challenge challenges with our comp systems. We've done some configuration changes, we've done some retest, and I think we're in good shape to go. Yeah, I know we've closed them all out.

There was like four items, maybe three in addition to the international piece. And they've all been closed. Okay. We'll do a couple more. Hand the room.

Let's go with Irene Klotz and then Jeff Foust. Thanks. Irene Klotz with Aviation Week. For Shannon, has a, stop work order now been issued for the mobile launcher, too. And, as far as SLS and Orion, if you're able to each, just give a summary of where the hardware status is for the core stage.

Vadim is three and the Orion, crew and service module for three. Thanks. So, so we have issued a stop work order for Mobile Launcher two. We've pivoted the team to be began removing some of the hardware that's common to mobile launcher, one that we can use as critical spares. Some of these items are very long lead items.

They're hard to build, and they will be put to good use, for future Artemis missions for supporting, Mobile Launcher one and from as the last into the far right for us, less, the boosters, the F segments are being loaded on the rail cars, and they're ready for shipment. So they'll be here in the first part of April. As you know, the core stage is, the engine section for core stages in high Bay to be an outfit at the top for FIS will be leaving McCue at the end of April and arriving here. I CPS is already complete in its own dock here locally. Obviously.

Ozone or both. In storage, waiting on the phone call to for assembly. So we're in really good shape for our mystery. And from our perspective, you know, we've been making good progress on this three so on the crew module side, we are wrapping up the final big installation. So, the heat shield is going, getting attached to the crew module this month, as well as a side hatch.

And then it's going to go through its paces for testing as an individual element. The crew module itself, if you might remember, the European service module arrived last December. Making great progress. We finished up thermal cycle testing on that. And, we're on plan for the summer to, put both the crew module and the service module, together.

All right, let's go to Jeff Foust, and then we'll go to several on the phone. Hi, Jeff. Out of space news. Just out of a little bit of a follow up to that question. We're talking now about doing three more Artemis missions through the end of 2028.

Rapid increase in the cadence compared to the gap between Artemis one and two. What lessons have you learned in the lead up to Artemis two that you will apply to be able to increase that cadence for Artemis three, four, and five? Well, I can tell you from a ground processing perspective, we, reduce our processing time and the multi-purpose processing facility, by 50%. That's where we serviced Orion, and that's where we fueled it. And, in the launch abort systems facility, reduce the processing time there by 30%.

And so, you know, we've already started applying, lessons learned from the Artemis one float, Artemis two. And that's why we're here today. That's why we're able to hold, you know, our February February commitment to roll. And as far as getting ready for Artemis three is concerned, we are going to be challenged. There's no doubt about it.

But our team is, energized. They're fired up. They look forward to the increased launch cadence. We'll do you know, we've already started collecting lessons learned from Artemis. Two processing as well.

And, you know, there will be probably some, you know, we'll probably have to staff up a bit. We'll have to, you know, go to different shifting profiles will have to, leverage, you know, the, you know, the, the Orion folks and the SLS folks during our processing flows to take full advantage of, you know, all the knowledge that we need, and we put that together. Well, we're going to go for it. We're going to try to meet the administrators challenge for us and for Miss Ellis. I will say we're assisting, Sean's team more and more through our OEMs here.

As I do the processing before we even get here, we have, we've upped our, presence in the supply chain at our sub tier vendors. We have engineers in the field helping these vendors work through their issues, building these critical parts. And then, one of the biggest items that's going to help us out is with the new core stage process. And with that we have. And how by two, which is vertical integration, it opens up a lot more work areas that we have.

We can work internal in the volumes and external the vehicle at the same time as previously. When we built the first one and the second one, we had mostly, horizontal work. Right. So there's the vertical assembly and how they do it has been a big enabler for us. Okay.

Yeah. I think from the Orion perspective, you know, even before this announcement, you know, we are very much, geared towards trying to build, our spaceships faster. So, all the investments made over the last couple of years, not only increase more infrastructure, in the operations checkout facility, which is where we build and put together the Orion spaceship, we increased in, the infrastructure there, including ground support equipment, including, our gantries, things like that, to enable us to build two spaceships in parallel. And, that was our investment. So I think, doing that has helped us, look forward in terms of meeting the ministry's challenge to get three, Orions out the door as quickly as we can to support these missions.

I think the other part that, very similar to what Chris was talking about, you know, supply chain and our supplier base is very important. Obviously, we have, all the hardware for three, but four and five, we're still getting delivery as a hardware. And we need to make sure that cadence, is, is quickly, moving forward, providing the hardware we need to build the spaceship. And, that's something we're investing a lot of time in. Very similar to what Chris described by being in with the, supply chain and, helping them where we can.

And just like the minister has said, I think it's really important for NASA to engage actively, to enable this to happen, as quickly as possible to support these missions. All right. We'll go to several questions on the phone. The first one will be from Joey Roulet with Reuters. Hey, thanks.

Question for Howard or Lori. On the last call with the astronauts, we were talking about the docking or not docking the, manual control test with Orion. And I was wondering for Artemis three if, the prox ops is going to need to be manual or autonomous or a little bit of both. How is that going to play out for that mission? Thanks.

So I'll take the first part and then we'll we'll kind of hand it over to Howard if he has more detail. I will tell you that our teams are actively working right now to, to really better understand the mission profile, for Artemis three, we know, our primary goal is to rendezvous and demonstrate rendezvous and docking with one or both of the human landing system landers. I expect details of exactly what those look like. Will be developed over the next, months and maybe a little beyond that as we really refine what those operations look like. But, you know, the, the key goal, honestly, with Artemis is three.

First off will be to coordinate, the launches and rendezvous. That's going to be a big challenge in and of itself. Then the the actual rendezvous operations and the proximity operations, I imagine, will be fairly similar to what we're trying to do with Artemis two. But we'll need to do that carefully. And then the docking maneuver.

So I'll, I'll hand it over to Howard. If you want to say more detail about what you anticipate those docking procedures to look like. Yeah, probably take up the rest of the time. Talking about my favorite topic of rendezvous, Prox ops and docking. But, I'll say very shortly.

Orion, we've always been, designed and we developed for autonomous capability all the way to docking. So the crew does not need to take over, in a manual way. But in the, heritage of the shuttle program where the crew members, would take the the stick and fly, what we call being on the docking access. So that right aligned, with where the docking mechanism and where the hatches are. And depends on the distance.

I can't remember the shuttle time, but for us, it will be something. We'll talk with the flight operations team and the crew, whether they would take the stick and finish the final approach and docking, the physical docking or not. So that's important. Discussion. But more importantly, just like anything else, you know, we want to make sure we understand our manual capabilities.

And so the Artemis two demonstration gives a crew an opportunity to really, I would say, test drive the car. They get a chance to really get a sense of, the feedback through the system of how the spacecraft performs. And that's going to be really important. And whether they need to or not. For Artemis three, that's, we can decide that later.

But to characterize that, to understand that, capability and what the spaceship, can do and perform and the response that it would provide, is really important. And I think, demonstrating that arms, too, will definitely give us, a great understanding and buy down risk as we move forward to Artemis three and beyond. The next question is from Will Robinson. Smith with Spaceflight Now. One, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.

Question for Howard. Hugh, if I may, we heard from Christina earlier today during the crew briefing about the, limitations of the suits as it relates to abort scenarios. But can you go into some detail and talk about once you get beyond the TLI burn? Specifically, what are the abort options for Orion if you need to make a maneuver that doesn't get you all the way out to the moon, but is more of a you turn back before then and then just briefly, what is the abort? Region weather looking like right now for a launch on the first.

Thanks. Okay. I'll ask. I guess I'll answer the first question. I don't know about the abort weather, so maybe I'll turn to Sean to, to help me with that.

We have, very capable abort coverage. You might hear a lot about the ascent piece, but I think you're talking about TLI or trans lunar injection. Burn that we would do, what we call those is, I would say less aborts, but early return. And what you would do as we move out, post TLI, we have a capability return, back to Earth at any, along any point of the trajectory. And it's different types of burns.

Certainly early in the mission, I think the first 36 hours or so, we'll probably do what I call turn and burn, which is you would not go to the moon if there was an emergency, a significant emergency, which we would have to bring the crew home immediately. We would do that. Burn, execute that burn. And, we've always we've already done all the calculations. We know what we need to do.

And so the crew come home safely after that. It's probably safer at times, from a time perspective, to fly around the moon and come back and take that free return trajectory. You're not getting any more time savings, and you don't have to do another big burn. You're on that path forward to hitting our entry corridor. And, so I think that's where we will make a decision as a, as a mission management team to determine how best to to move forward.

But we do have a continuous, early return capability that we've already run hundreds of thousands of trajectories against, and ensure that we are able to get the crew home safely. Yeah. As far as, launch abort weather is concerned, it's currently forecast is go on Thursday, we have, three types of aborts that we could do right after launch. One is called a last aboard a launch abort system. Abort where the, spacecraft would, land, you know, fairly close to the launch site and then a untargeted Atlantic abort, which would land somewhere across the Atlantic near near Africa, and then abort once around.

Possibility if we went into a single orbit and then come back down near our nominal landing site in San Diego, our recovery forces are gathering as we speak out in San Diego. All the equipment they we're going to use for, recovery is being loaded on the ship as we speak. And, and we're we're ready to go as far as our abort, scenarios are concerned. Our next question is from Christopher Mack with the Hudson Star Observer. Thank you all for doing this today.

I guess my question kind of follows up under what was just mentioned. I know you don't have everything available at this time, but if the launch were to happen at the beginning of the, the two hour launch window on April 1st, can you talk about what approximately the splashdown time would be off San Diego? Oh, I don't have that. We can follow up with your follow up once we hit, once we do that TLI burn, it's it's set, but we'll we'll find it for you. Okay, let's go back to several more here in the room.

We'll come on this side here in the front row. Hi, Josh Jenner, Space. com. Are there any even minor technical issues or risk assessments that are still open that may, pose the potential of pushing the launch into any, you know, by a few days into this window? I mean, I'm going to jump in looking at Sean, shake his head.

No, there. There's, you know, little things that we find as we go that we're working right there, but none of them are threatening the first right now. Yeah, I would agree. I mean, we had a minor issue on our flare stack where one of our pilot lights don't work. We have three of them.

One of them doesn't work to fix it tomorrow. But that's the kind of stuff we're talking about right now. And I'll take that any day. Yeah, yeah. In vehicles.

Quiet. We're not working anything. Yeah, we're we're we don't have any issues with working. Like I said. Okay.

We'll come to Phillips last I Phillips last. I think this is for Chris. Just following up on questions from Irene and earlier. It sounds like there's a lot of vessels hardware for Artemis three that's going to be coming to the Cape here this month or April. I had one follow up on that, which was when the when the 4/5 gets here, is the engine section going to be ready to do that final meet with it.

It's there is some work still to be done when it gets here. Doesn't it's not like it rolls in and lifts up. So there's, there's a little bit of work that has to be done, but it's, it's all part of the plan. And but it's ready. And based on our assessment last week.

Right. We looked at where everything was in the blockchain and the work that's being completed when Sean's going to need it, we're going to have it ready for him. When it's time to to hang it on the booster. We'll be ready to go. Okay.

We'll stick here with the room. Thank you. With all that, did anyone or did the CubeSats onboard the mission need anyone, have any any kind of servicing or. They're fine. I'm ready to go.

Yeah, I can tell you. We are carrying four CubeSats for, payloads, secondary payloads, from our international partners for different, international partners. We have, one from Argentina, Germany, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. Thank you. And I think only one of them required a top off on their battery.

The others were fine. They didn't need any work. The fourth one, the the battery was topped off, and it's fine. So they're all in very good shape. Ready for launch.

Okay, we'll go here to chem. I can't Kramer. Thank you. Thank thanks for this, update. And good luck with everything.

Howard, let me let me ask you, can you describe the parks prox ops in in a lot greater detail than than what we've heard. And I want to know how close it will be to, like, when you would do the human landing system docking on Artemis three. I guess it's going to be informed there. But can you go into how much and what are we going to see in real time? Are you going to have video of this demonstration?

Thanks. I don't know about the video part, but I'll just give you some, quick highlights. You know, we, we separate from the upper stage and, and then we'll go out, probably about 100m. So we'll flip over and then we'll start doing that approach. And the approach will be all the way to about ten meters.

So about 30 some feet. And so the crew will be manually piloting along the way. There's specific things, the tasks that they're going to be doing. In and it's going to be very exciting, I think, to just not only because a new spacecraft, but something that we would play forward in terms of what their ability, like I said earlier. And so that demonstration, then there's a second part, which we back away again and do a hold.

And then actually, the I would say the ICP slews over and then we do another process, other, reflectors on the side, the ISPs that we're using, to dock or to, to, reflect from and to get, get understanding how that would, work in terms of visualization from our docking camera. And so those things will be very important for us to understand the closer approach. Now, rendezvous and docking is thousands of miles, right. Starting at very far away. So you're getting very close in terms of what, what the final sets of, our ability to do prox ops and demonstration, for final mission.

But there's a lot of work prior to that. Obviously, we can't do that now. We will do some long range, bearing. We have a camera bearing camera as we depart from ISPs and capture all that data as we go forward. So the equipment that we need, to understand the environment that we're going to be under, and what we would get is really important to capture for this mission.

But certainly there's still a good amount of work remaining to do to enable for us to do the entire rendezvous and docking scenario. And, Ken, to your question about what you can expect to see, we do expect the public will be able to see the same view from the docking camera that the crew is seeing. So we'll be able to show you that if all is going well, that's not exciting. Okay. Our next question, we're going to go back to the phone.

This is from Claire Cameron with Scientific American. Hi there. Thanks so much for doing this. I did want to ask again about the potential for space weather and how you are sort of planning for that and whether that could have some impact on launch date. Thanks.

I believe I saw a note this morning that says, right now we're not watching anything, in the, the, weather report we got today and said the space weather risk was low. But we can look and see if we can get you additional detail, but that's, right now, we're not keeping an eye on anything. Okay. Our next question is from David Daniels with About Space Today news. My question is for Ron Howard.

This morning, there were two, comments made about how Orion might be performing. The first one, I believe it was, commander Reed who said something about having the addition of the life support system might have an effect on how the spacecraft might operate. And the second one, I thought interesting was about exercising inside the spacecraft and how that might affect the Orion spacecraft. Operations. Could you comment on those two, please?

Yeah. You bet. The first one, the way we get rid of a carbon dioxide is we've ended up on the spaceship. So we have a, component, called this CO2 humidity control box. And that box absorbs the CO2 that comes out of human beings, and then we dump it overboard, and that's venting.

And you can imagine if you're anywhere a physics student, you can imagine that when you and part of force on the vehicle, whether it's venting or anything else, there's you got to counteract that force. And, so that's what we talk about when we, talked about the ecosystem imparting some things on the spaceship. So we have to correct that. We have, very robust attitude control system, closed loop. And so it's not just any of those, situations, and we could swing, this CHC or the CO2 human control system, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, however we want, based on what we need, how much CO2 we need to remove.

And so this is going to be, important understanding of how the spacecraft, controls our attitude of the vehicle. And make sure that it responds to this venting environment. So that's one piece. And then the second thing is very related as well. We have a flywheel.

That's our exercise device. Think about it's not exactly a rower. If you go to the gym. It's more than that. But you can see as, as, in a rowing kind of motion, which is what they're going to be doing in space.

You can see that there's dynamics involved in terms of the forces that are being applied from that, motion. And those forces have to be counteract, from a spaceship perspective as well. So our jets, our reaction control jets will be, augmenting or dissipating any of those things. So that's going to be really interesting test as well. We're going to try to, I think, cycle through each crew member, 30 minutes of exercise, a day is, I think our plan still and then we'll have a lot of understanding of the dynamics.

And, it's really important that, obviously, as we go into deep space, that, the human body gets to exercise and we're learning a lot on this mission, beyond what we have in space station. Space station has a lot of, great exercise equipment. You can't put all the treadmills and things like that on our spaceship. And so this, flywheel is a really great, exercise tool that, we're learning from and, utilizing as we go forward. All right, we'll take one more question from the phone, and then we'll come back into the room here.

Our next question is from TJ Mascaro with the Epic Times. Good afternoon. Thank you all so much. Question for, Lori and Howard. When we were talking to the astronauts, they mentioned, an eclipse event.

If, they launched on April 1st and second. Can you talk a little bit more about that, what you're expecting and preparing for sure. So, I'll speak to it from kind of the exciting science part of it. And then, Howard can speak to it from the Orion performance, side of it. Yeah, I think it's going to be very interesting.

In this flight, if we are able to launch on the first, the crew are going to get to have some pretty interesting eclipse opportunity, to be able to look back at the disc of the, the moon, with, the sun being an eclipse. And I think from a science perspective, they'll be able to see the, the sun's corona. And I think it'll be really fascinating and an a great kind of observation. Opportunity for the crew there. It's kind of a, I think, going to be a unique thing on this one.

Go ahead. Howard, you want to speak to the. Yeah, I think, you know, I get question a lot. When are we launching? Why is this day in?

This day is out? There's a lot of several factors, obviously, but. But, power is one of the analysis that we do, to screen for eclipses. We we know where the eclipses are happening, and, we want to make sure we're power positive is what we use the word for. And so when we screen across multiple trajectories, multiple days, every minute of the launch period, by the way, to ensure that we have significant, power positive, margins when we enter into, into a Lipps eclipse.

I'm sorry, no lips eclipse. And then making sure that, there's not other segmented, eclipses that could happen. So we have time to recharge our batteries. And so when we do that, we, we run hundreds of thousands of trajectories per each launch period. And so I think many of you asked, when can we launch?

A lot of that work across multiple launch periods or be done by a really great team. And we look at, all the power and any aboard cases as well. Also, when we have abort trajectories, we will also have eclipses. So for north nominal and abort, for the April 1st to the six, we've, we've got power positive margin and so, that's why we can say that we can fly these missions with confidence. All right.

We'll come back into the room. Let's go over here to Marsha, and then we'll come to Josh and Marsha Knapp again. Lori, you I've heard you say for out of your figuring on for a real true attempts in six days, how do you figure that and and a countdown question if it's just the weather in the rockets sitting on the pad for two hours and doesn't go if it's just weather, can you turn that around in 24 hours and try the next day? So I'm going to talk to just a little bit, and I'm going to hand it to Sean because he can probably give you more detail. So we have six days that each of those six days, the first 3 to 6 are viable launch days.

But we do need to, if we do a scrub at, there's, at least 24 hours to turn around. And in some cases, we need to replenish some of the, the, the, the, the gases and things that we need to, to fuel the spacecraft and run the spacecraft. So those sometimes we'll need to do a 48 hour scrub. So if you take the six days that we have available, if some of those are 24 opportunities and some of them are 48 hours scrubs, we think we can get up to four launch attempts within that six day period. Sean can speak more to the the resources that are required and what drive the 24 versus 48.

As part of getting ready for Artemis two, we actually, installed a new 1. 4 million gallon hydrogen door. And so that enables us, the four launch attempts that Laura referred to. Yeah, they're, you know, 20 whether it's a 24 hour scrub or a 48 hour scrub really depends on the reason you know, it depends on what the hardware problem was. Or, you know, or when we scrub in, in the launch countdown.

So for real late, that means we're using more hydrogen. We're we're bleeding off more hydrogen. We scrub early. We're not bleeding off as much, but we're prepared for a 24 hour scrub turnaround, for just about any case. So it's purely.

Yeah, if it's purely weather, we can hit a 24 hour. Okay, we'll come here. Let's wait for Mike to come around. Yep. Hi, Josh.

Junior Space. com again. Are this one's for you? You mentioned Orion's attitude control system, and I know there's a demonstration of the two different attitude control modes during the mission. Can you talk about the differences between the six degree and three degree of freedom, configurations and which scenarios?

Both of them are sort of advantageous over the other to be used? Yeah. You know, Wow, that's a very good question. I yeah, it was expected. Okay.

So going to back to, guidance, navigation control. So six degrees of freedom allows you to obviously do XY and Z and translate as well. So, for us we're always in the six degree of freedom, configuration. That gives us a fine control. If we needed to, we'd go to a three off to clean, three degrees of freedom to clean it up if necessary, based on the RCS configuration.

But in general. And then we're going to do a test. Both. Right. Our our ability to control the spacecraft is really important.

And our ability to have a closed loop control system that allows us to do both and, jet selection logic along with that. So we have multiple jets that we can use to fire together. And combination is really important as well. So all those things are part of our I guess that the answer is yes. We're going to do both.

Yes, they're very important. But in general, six degrees of freedom is, is the control, mode that we would generally want to be in. Okay. We'll go to one on the phone we have Micah made in Berg with the Wall Street Journal. Hey.

Thanks, Rachel. Maybe for Lori. Could you remind me just about the role of the prime contractors? At this point, specific to SLS and Orion, like, our folks from the companies actively working with NASA teams right into launch, or is it more. They're on standby if something comes up some color, there would be great.

Thanks so much. Yeah, thank you for the question, mica. In fact, I'm really excited to answer this one. You know, we are still working very, very closely with, with all of our prime contractors. In fact, you know, the, the issue that we had that required us to roll back to the VAB, the the helium, quick disconnect, connection, there was a great example that showed our, our NASA teams and our contractor teams from, from Boeing and ULA, and from our, our, ground system contractor teams and our NASA teams, all working together as one team.

It was fantastic. And it's great to see we're, you know, we're just trying to solve the problems and get the work done. So we are working really closely with our contractors, all the contractors and the NASA folks, including the folks from Boeing, Lockheed, ULA, north of Grumman. We're all in there together. And there's more as well, but we're all in there together.

And when we get questions about how are we going to turn around faster and be able to implement the accelerated plan that the administrators rolled out for Artemis three, 4 or 5 and beyond? I think this is the way we're going to work together in the future much more closely and more integrated and more collaboratively with these integrated teams. So it's been a great demonstration here. Okay. Let's go on this side to Lauren Grush again.

Hi. Thanks for taking a second question. I'm just curious, what, if any, flexibility do you have with the biggest maneuvers that you have planned in space? For instance, if a burn doesn't happen exactly at the right time, is there any wiggle room or are there just some maneuvers that have to go off as planned and or else they can't happen? Thank you.

Maybe you want me to take that? Yeah. Why don't you take, So all our burns that are on Orion side, obviously, including the trans lunar injection burn? We have a recovery plan. So, two things could happen.

One, if your main engine, cuts out. So we have our auxiliary engines that would go forward. We also could also do a replan of that and, continue that, burn as well. So that that's there, we certainly have covered, all the other burns. There's one burn, that's we call critical.

That must be done. It's, return trajectory correction. Burn three, RTC three. It's about five hours before we hit entry interface. That really corrects and makes sure we hit that corridor, which is really important.

Obviously, for making sure we can get the crew home safely, through, the Earth entry point. And so that's our only burn that is, critical. The rest we can, replan, I would say, and clean up as necessary if we do not get a full burn off. Okay, let's go to Bill Harwood next. And I, for for Mr.

Quinn. You. I'm a little confused on the recycle options. I thought if you guessed it up and got late in the window, you couldn't do a 24 hour turnaround, that there's some limit that, you know, if you put fuel on board, that affects when you can go again. I just wanted to clarify that that was true for Argus one.

It's not true for Artemis two. You know, we've got the 1. 4 million gallons sphere. That gives us a much more significant, hydrogen storage capability at the launch site, the later the window. So, yeah, I believe so.

I mean, I'll confirm, but I believe so. Yeah. I mean, next on the side, another, countdown question. Is there a point, in the count where if you hold or for weather or technical issue that you no longer have the whole two hours, like if you get into terminal count, is it commit I mean, are you able to stop and retarget later in the window, or do you lose some options at some point in the countdown, we can recycle about T -five minutes if we if we if we hold account before t -five minutes, we can recycle back and try for another attempt. Okay.

We'll take another one on the phone from Will Robinson. Smith with Spaceflight Now. I thanks Rachel for allowing another one. Question to I suppose whoever wants to take it, maybe Sean, if the IC isn't able to get Orion into the high Earth orbit, but the Orion module, both crew and service are working just fine. What would a low earth orbit version of Artemis two look like?

About how long would that last? And what operations could you accomplish in that scenario? Thanks. Sorry. Question for Howard again.

So we also have, what we call alternate mission scenarios by which we allow ourselves to potentially do a circular orbit. We have a couple options, to circuit lies and execute as much, of the objectives that we can, if there's something that happens, where we could not, get the upper stage to get us a nice burn. So there is various options. We looked at, we're able to do some of those mission, completion things. And it depends on where we get dropped off.

What happens? So, it depends on the scenario we're in, but we're definitely ready for those types of scenarios. Well, and a flight control team knows what to do. We've already done, planning for that. We've already assessed a lot of those trajectories, to make sure that we're ready to go and have in my hand, if necessary.

Okay. We'll go actually back there to Miles Dorn. Dorn, CBS news question for Howard. I know the main engine is used for the TLI burn. Which engines are used for the other burns?

The ATC burns, the RTC burns. Is it all the auxiliary thrusters, or can you use both? What, what's the plan? The OMS burn is too. Too much.

We don't expect to make that correction. Our navigation state should be, very good unless something happens along the way and we can't, so all of them are planned to be on the, what you call auxiliary ox burns? We. If they're small enough, we might even do in the reaction control system on the service module as well. So that'll depend on, you know what?

As we approach each ATC, each RTC, which is outbound trajectory correction and then, return trajectory corrections will determine how best to utilize our thrusters. But yes, in general, it'll be the auxiliary engines. Okay. Let's go to Ken here in the front. Thank you.

Thanks for a second question, Ken Kramer, SpaceX up close. Howard, what what is the width of the reentry corridor? I don't know if I've heard a number. And I would also like to get an update on the Rs 25 engines. You've got to build new ones for Artemis five.

We haven't heard a lot about it. So. So what is the status? Because if you're going to launch Artemis 5 in 2 years, you you got to get them built and tested pretty soon. Thanks.

Yeah I when you say with I'll have to get back with you on what you're asking. You mean the width of the corridor in terms of cross range, is that correct? The cross range. We got range downrange. Track of up to 7075.

Even even as their approach. Yeah. I'll have to get you that number. Sorry, I don't remember off the top of my head on that one. Okay.

The astronauts are real concerned about that. Yeah, it's. Yeah, I can probably delve into more of it, but, we'll get you that number. Okay? Okay.

And on the Rs 25. Right for arms five. They are in production, flights set. So we've all completed, our acceptance hotbar. And on two of those, the engines already.

So they are in the production phase, and we're working through it. You you'll go back, you can you can pull some of the, burns and the test from Stennis when we we went through those, test of those new engines. So they're in play, and they do support. All right. And with that, we'll go ahead and wrap up.

I want to thank our participants very much for being here today. We will provide another status update tomorrow on how the countdown is going as it gets underway. That'll be at approximately 5 p. m. eastern time tomorrow.

As always, you can follow the latest news and mission events and our progress on NASA. gov. Thank you for joining us.

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