The side quest has been underway. Now it is up to the House 🇺🇸... for Snort.

The challenge was already accepted.

Will an act of Congress be able to get an F-14 flying again? congress.gov/bill/119th-cong…

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

Speechless NASA: flickr.com/photos/nasa2explo…

We Went. #ArtemisII

Engineers have devised a way to verify the system and are currently preparing to test this solution.

🚨ARTEMIS II UPDATE🚨 Teams are working an issue with the flight termination system. The countdown is continuing and additional updates will be provided as available.

Let’s go!

Tomorrow, we launch. At sunset tonight, Artemis II waits on the pad, ready to carry astronauts potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century. The next era of exploration begins.

I’ve been waiting literally decades for NASA to articulate a plan for a Moon base. Now Carlos Garcia-Galan is doing a masterful job of precisely this. Dozens of landings. Drones. RTGs. Rovers. Habitats. Excavators. This is incredible stuff.

Hard to believe it took seven years to finally stop the insanity but Lunar Gateway has been deleted. That is, seven years since NASA admitted it was pointless. Background: caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2…

EXCLUSIVE: @NASA Boss Reveals New Artemis II Launch Plans And Details Ambitious 2027 Lunar Base Start Date; Says Manned Mars Missions And Humans Becoming An Interplanetary Species Within The Next Decade This week on Straight to the Point I sat down with @NASAAdmin Jared Isaacman at NASA’s DC Headquarters. In this exclusive interview, the head of the United States space program laid out the future of American missions to the Moon, Mars, the Orbital economy and beyond. @thelatmg @latimesstudios_ Straight to the Point: NASA’s Lunar Ambitions, Mars and Beyond 01:05 Artemis II Launch Window 02:45 Taking Astronauts Farther Into Space Than Ever Before 04:00 NASA Now On Track For Lunar Landing 2028 04:50 Breaking Ground On Lunar Base in 2027 06:20 Humans Become An Interplanetary Species 08:00 Mars Timeline: Within Next Decade 10:50 Nuclear Propulsion Technology Is Game Changer 11:30 China Is On A “Sprint” To The Moon 12:15 You Can’t Be Number #1 On Earth and Number #2 In Space 13:30 What Keeps NASA Administrator Up At Night 14:20 President Trump: Build Enduring Presence On The Moon And Beyond 15:25 Reusable Rockets Have “Ignited” Orbital Economy 16:42 Potential For Tremendous Wealth In Space 17:25 Data Centers In Space Next Five Years 18:55 First Meeting Elon Musk 20:05 What Makes Musk Standout: Takes On Most Challenging Engineering Problems 21:03 What’s Next With Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin 22:20 Space X Broke The Monopoly 24:50 Life Beyond Earth: President Trump Declassifies UAP and UFO Files 26:15 Justification for NASA Budget 28:18 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” 29:20 Independent Journalism

Your analogy remains incorrect. Falcon 9 has launched 620 times and will continue to do so. Despite more than a decade of work and enormous investment, SLS has launched once and was on a 3 year cadence. Changing vehicle configuration with hardware that continues to be troubled, changing launchers and integrating into the pad when the current setup is far from perfect, and launching a Moon rocket every three years is not a path to success. If you and the rest of the space-loving community care about actually returning astronauts to the Moon and building a base, then standardization and acceleration are the only way.

Yes, there were fixes based on what was observed after Artemis I. We will soon find out if ML-1 is more resilient after Artemis II launches. Regardless, having the team and the resources to turn the pad and meet the target launch cadence is an program necessity.

The scale of this pad is hard to understand. The compactor looks so small!

***Audio Warning*** Pad 2's full deluge system at Starbase has been tested for the first time, and WOWWWWWW is it impressive! 🎥 nsf.live/starbase @NASASpaceflight

We’re still going to Mars and the timeframe for building a self-growing city there is still about the same at 20 to 30 years. It’s possible that revenue from lunar activities might actually accelerate Mars.

With the conclusion of the wet dress rehearsal today, we are moving off the February launch window and targeting March for the earliest possible launch of Artemis II. With more than three years between SLS launches, we fully anticipated encountering challenges. That is precisely why we conduct a wet dress rehearsal. These tests are designed to surface issues before flight and set up launch day with the highest probability of success. During the test, teams worked through a liquid hydrogen leak at a core stage interface during tanking, which required pauses to warm hardware and adjust propellant flow. All core stage and interim cryogenic propulsion stage tanks were successfully filled, and teams conducted a terminal countdown to about T-5 minutes before the ground launch sequencer halted operations due to an increased leak rate. Additional factors included extended Orion closeout work, intermittent ground audio dropouts, and cold-weather impacts to some cameras, along with the successful demonstration of updated Orion closeout purge procedures to support safe crew operations. As always, safety remains our top priority, for our astronauts, our workforce, our systems, and the public. As noted above, we will only launch when we believe we are as ready to undertake this historic mission. This is just the beginning. It marks the start of an Artemis program that will evolve to support repeated and affordable missions to the Moon, in line with President Trump’s national space policy. Getting this mission right means returning to the Moon to stay and a future to Artemis 100 and beyond. I want to thank the talented workforce at NASA, along with our industry and international partners, who are working tirelessly on this effort. The team will fully review the data, troubleshoot each issue encountered during WDR, make the necessary repairs, and return to testing. We expect to conduct an additional wet dress rehearsal and then target the March window. We will continue to keep the public and the media informed as readiness progresses.