When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.NASA’s Artemis 2 moon rocket is seen inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Feb. 25, 2026, after rolling back from the launch pad. | Credit: Josh Dinner/Space.comNASA needs to wait one more day to roll its moon rocket back to the launchpad, but that shouldn’t affect when it launches.The Artemis 2 Space Launch System (SLS) rocket has been inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida since its rollback from its launchpad last month. The agency had been gearing up for a March flight around the moon, but prelaunch tests revealed maintenance requirements engineers could only address back in the hangar.AdvertisementAdvertisementNow, the agency is planning to roll SLS back to the pad at Launch Complex-39B (LC-39B) on March 20 — a one-day delay from its previous March 19 target. The culprit this time can be traced to an electrical harness for the flight termination system in need of a quick replacement. The work on said harness is already complete, but added just enough work to NASA engineers’ pre-rollout checklist to push the rocket’s transportation back to LC-39B by 24 hours. It won’t, however, delay the April 1 target date for Artemis 2’s launch, according to a NASA update.NASA is still aiming to launch SLS during an Artemis 2 window that lasts from April 1-6. The mission is the first crewed installment of NASA’s Artemis program, and the first flight of the Orion spacecraft with astronauts onboard.The shakedown cruise will fly NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day trip around the moon on the first crewed mission to lunar space in more than half a century. It’s designed as a stepping stone to later Artemis missions planned over the next few years that will test and mature technologies like deep space life support systems and new lunar landers for NASA’s ultimate goal for the program: establishing a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.It’s a similar concept to how NASA has maintained the International Space Station’s continual occupancy for the past 25 years, through crew rotations and cargo supply missions to sustain crews in space while they conduct scientific research in low Earth orbit. NASA wants a similar framework for missions to the surface of the moon, but must first perfect the technologies needed to enable such long-term excursions so far from Earth, where an emergency evacuation would take days instead of hours.AdvertisementAdvertisementIf all goes according to plan during Orion’s debut astronaut mission around the moon on Artemis 2, NASA plans to launch Artemis 3 to low Earth orbit (LEO) to rehearse rendezvous and docking maneuvers with either or both of the two lunar landers contracted for the Artemis program. Those include SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander. Both have experienced development delays, however, and are part of the reason the current Artemis mission architecture is outlined the way it is.Artemis 3 had originally been slated as the program’s first moon landing, with a target launch in 2028. A recent prog …
