Artemis II Lunar Space Race Begins, NASA's Jared Isaacman

NASA began rolling out a costly rocket to the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, a milestone in a lunar space race between the US and China.

The 4-mile trip to move the Boeing Co. Space Launch System rocket and Lockheed Martin Corp. Orion spacecraft from the assembly building to the launch site will take the team as long as 12 hours, according to a NASA news release.

Once the rocket and spacecraft arrive at the site, NASA will begin other preparations for the flight, including connecting ground support equipment, testing hardware components and checking ground infrastructure systems.

In development for about a decade and a half, the SLS is over budget and behind schedule, having only launched once so far, an uncrewed test flight in 2022 that orbited the moon. Each launch costs more than $4 billion.

President Donald Trump’s budget for this year proposed a phase out of the SLS after the rocket’s third flight, calling it “grossly expensive and delayed,” but Texas Senator Ted Cruz successfully pushed for $4.1 billion in new funds as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that Trump signed in July.

The rollout on Friday is the first step in the Artemis II mission to send a crew of four astronauts to fly around the moon and return within ten days. The flight, which NASA originally had scheduled for late 2024, is now set to launch no later than April.

Once NASA completes the rollout and launch pad checks, the agency will run a wet dress rehearsal at the end of January to practice fueling the rocket. The wet dress must go smoothly before other steps can proceed.

“Wet dress is the big test at the pad. That’s the one to keep an eye on,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the Artemis launch director at NASA, said during a press conference on Friday.

The US and China are spending billions of dollars to put humans back on the moon. Beijing aims to land a crewed Chinese mission for the first time by 2030.

Artemis II’s mission will test all of Orion’s life-support systems to ensure that they are functional in deep space, paving the way for Artemis III to execute the first crewed lunar landing since December 1972.

That mission, using the SLS and Orion to send four astronauts to the moon, is now planned for 2027.

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