The ten-day around-the-Moon mision launches at 6:26 pm Eastern US time, about 26 minutes from when this is posted. Actually, that is the start of a 2-hour launch window. Stay tuned!
Watch the official NASA broadcast below.
The Artemis 2 launch is set to go in half an hour; watch it here
April 1, 2026 • 4:59 pm
I am very excited! This is hopefully a welcome and positive break from world distractions.
WOOOOO!
Thanks for posting. Cousins’ seder was delayed so I got to watch them through meco. Still worry about heat shield on reentry. Amazing sights in store for them over the next week or so.
This is an exciting mission. I just wish it were in the service of advancing a cheaper, safer platform like SpaceX instead of an extraordinarily expensive set of risky one-offs. Seems old fashioned already.
The launch was pretty awesome to watch. Thank you for the link.
Being rather maudlin by nature, the thought I had as minute or two after launch is that there are some number of people that were born 21-27dec 1968 during Apollo 8, and some number of them will pass in the interval between 6:35PMEDT and a week from now, the entirety of their lives being bracketed by, to first approximation, two consecutive editions of the same space mission.
I could do the math, based on the actuarial data, and know how many people it is, or I can just consider the era through which these people lived, the good and the bad, the progress and the losses, and hope they found joy in at least some of it.
Artemis tracker :
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis-ii/arow/
(Not working for me. Must be a bug 😁)