Glaze: Artemis II Could Launch as Early as February 2026

Lori Glaze, NASA’s Acting Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development, said today the Artemis II crewed flight test could lift off from Kennedy Space Center as early as February 2026. That would be nine months from now and two months earlier than the current schedule — “tomorrow” in aerospace time. She also stressed that the Trump Administration’s interest in human exploration of Mars does not mean they are moving away from the goal of sustained presence on the Moon.

Artemis II will take NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day trip beyond the Moon and back to Earth.

Speaking to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee this morning, Glaze said they are making “incredible progress.”

We are really moving forward. We’re pushing towards a launch as early as February, but no later than April of 2026. — Lori Glaze

Glaze credited Koch with the “tomorrow” metaphor. Koch and her three Artemis II crewmates have been in training since April 2023.

Artemis II will be the second flight of Boeing’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, but the Lockheed Martin Orion capsule on that mission didn’t have a life support system.  This will be the first test of the life support system and the four astronauts will be entirely dependent on it.

They will not go into lunar orbit, much less land, but instead fly a free-return trajectory that will bring them back to Earth even if Orion’s propulsion system doesn’t perform as planned. NASA changed the trajectory somewhat so Orion has a gentler reentry into Earth’s atmosphere because Orion’s heat shield experienced unexpected charring on Artemis I.  Determining why and whether the heat shield is safe for the Artemis II crew delayed this flight from September 2025 to April 2026. Glaze seems optimistic they can get back two of those months.

“We’re really getting close and the crew are getting really excited about it. And we are as well.” — Lori Glaze

The various components of the SLS rocket are being stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center right now and Lockheed Martin turned the Artemis II Orion capsule over to NASA last Thursday, May 1.

If all goes well, Artemis III will launch in mid-2027.  That’s the mission that will land a crew on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.  Their destination is the Moon’s South Pole, an entirely different location from the Apollo landings that were in the mid-latitudes.  The crew hasn’t been selected yet.

The South Pole has permanently shadowed regions that are never exposed to sunlight. Some scientists believe water, deposited by comet impacts over the eons, remains embedded in the lunar regolith and could be extracted to support human outposts there despite difficult terrain and dramatic temperature changes between areas in sunlight and those in darkness.

Although Artemis is focused on sending astronauts to the South Pole, NASA wants to know if there are other parts of the Moon where astronauts could conduct high-value science. The National Academies Committee on Key Non-Polar Destinations Across the Moon to Address Decadal-Level Science Objectives with Human Explorers is tasked with answering that question.

Co-chaired by James Day and Dan Dumbacher, the committee is holding its first public meeting this week. Day is a planetary geologist and geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. Dumbacher now is a professor of engineering practice at Purdue University, but spent most of his career at NASA and led the SLS program in its early years of development. The committee heard from Glaze and Jake Bleacher, NASA’s Chief Exploration Scientist, this morning. Nicky Fox, the head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, spoke with them yesterday. The chairs and co-chairs of the Academies’ recent Decadal Surveys and other experts also made presentations.

Glaze and Bleacher emphasized they only want the committee to recommend locations where astronauts are uniquely required to conduct scientific operations rather than simply using robotic spacecraft.  What are the “most compelling” locations for scientific research “where it makes the most sense to use our incredibly valuable crew to do that?” Glaze asked.

She also stressed that while the Trump Administration has a strong interest in human exploration of Mars “that does not mean moving away from the Moon. It does mean, in parallel, we will be making investments in early technologies that are needed for Mars. But we’re not moving away from sustained lunar presence.”

The Trump Administration does not want to use SLS and Orion for lunar missions beyond Artemis III, however, and plans to rely on commercial alternatives instead, so the path forward after Artemis III is unclear.