NASAs Artemis II moon rocket rolled back to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center just after midnight on March 20, following repairs and maintenance work. The rollout, delayed from an earlier plan by high winds, began at 24:20 local time. The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, mounted on a mobile launcher atop Crawler-Transporter 2, completed the four-mile trip from the Vehicle Assembly Building in 11 hours, arriving at 11:21 local time.
This marked the second trip to the pad for the Artemis II stack this year, after an initial rollout in January and a return for testing. The vehicle had been brought back to the assembly building following a February 21 wet dress rehearsal, where teams found an issue with helium flow to the upper stage. Engineers addressed it by activating new flight termination system batteries, replacing others on the upper stage, core stage, and solid rocket boosters, and charging Orions launch abort system batteries. They also replaced a seal on the core stage liquid oxygen feed line and retested the oxygen tail service mast umbilical plate.
Artemis II, the first crewed Artemis mission, will send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day lunar flyby—the first since the Apollo era. NASA targets a launch no earlier than April 1, with additional windows in early April.