When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.Credit: Space.com / Josh DinnerCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The crew of Artemis 2, NASA’s first launch to the moon in over half a century, has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center ahead of their mission.NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen piloted T-38 jets from the Johnson Space Center in Houston to touch down on the runway at KSC’s Shuttle Landing Facility at 2:15 p.m. EDT (1915 GMT) today (March 27), here on the Space Coast.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe quartet are poised to launch aboard NASA’s Space Launch System rocket (SLS) as soon as April 1, and will fly the agency’s Orion spacecraft on a 10-day mission around the moon and back to Earth. It’s the first crewed mission of NASA’s Artemis program to establish a sustained human presence on the moon, and the first to launch astronauts there since Apollo 17, in 1972.The crew have been in quarantine since March 20, when SLS was rolled from KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to the pad at Launch Complex-39B (LC-39B). Now at their last terrestrial stop before heading to space, the Artemis 2 astronauts will remain in quarantine through the remainder of the mission’s upcoming launch window, which extends through April 6.It was the second such rollout for the Artemis 2 SLS, which NASA was forced to roll the rocket back to the VAB from the pad after its initial rollout earlier this year due to maintenance issues discovered during prelaunch tests in February.Artemis 2 is designed as a stepping stone for the Artemis program, and will test Orion’s life support systems in space with astronauts aboard for the first time. The crew won’t land on the moon during Artemis 2, but will instead fly in a loop around its far side on a course known as a free-return trajectory …
