ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA officials gave an update Thursday on the status of the Artemis I moon rocket launch, saying it likely is targeting early to mid-June before it rolls back out to the launch pad for a wet dress rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson had suggested that August would be the earliest for a launch attempt, and NASA’s Jim Free, the associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, confirmed that.
“As we’ve been saying, we’ll set that official launch date after we get through wet dress,” Free said. “But you know based on some of historical challenges from similar programs over the years and the schedule performance we’ve seen thus far, we are looking at a couple of launch periods through the August time frame.”
One of the previously announced launch windows runs from July 26 to Aug. 9.
NASA rolled the Space Launch System rocket topped with the Orion spacecraft to KSC’s Launch Pad 39-B back in mid-March and attempted to run through a simulated countdown.
The three previous attempts led to three scrubs as NASA encountered a variety of issues, mostly on the mobile launcher on which the Artemis I hardware sits.
