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Artemis I liftoff. Photo: NASA

The Artemis II mission will mark humanity’s return to lunar exploration with a crewed spacecraft for the first time since Apollo 17 in December 1972. NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft will carry astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on an approximately 10-day journey around the Moon and back to Earth.

The launch window opens on February 6, 2026, with additional opportunities on February 7th, 8th, 10th, and 11th. Launch will occur from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center—the same historic pad complex that sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon aboard Apollo 10. After that, LC-39B was reconfigured for the Space Shuttle program, serving as the launch site for 53 missions.

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Artemis II.

One of the goals of SLS was to reuse remaining hardware from NASA’s Shuttle program where possible. This was intended to be a cost-saving measure, but given the high price of a single SLS stack costs more than two billion dollars: The SLS rocket for Artemis II (and each Artemis mission) costs approximately $4.1 billion per launch per the NASA OIG, with about half of that being tied up in the rocket and capsule. That’s a lot of money.

Still, there a lot of previously flown pieces of hardware on America’s newest moon rocket.

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Artemis II

SLS began its slow and deliberate journey to Launch Pad 39B from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) early on January 17 at Kennedy Space Center, marking a major milestone in the agency’s quest to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time in more than half a century.

The 322-foot-tall rocket emerged from the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at 7:04 a.m. EST, carried atop Crawler-Transporter 2 for the four-mile trek to the historic launch complex. The combined stack — rocket, Orion capsule, and mobile launcher — weighs approximately 11 million pounds and is traveling at a top speed of just under one mile per hour.

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Good things come to those who wait, or so goes the old saying. For Blue Origin and the second flight of New Glenn, the second flight of New Glenn was definitely worth that wait: a flawless liftoff, flight to orbit and a booster safely landed aboard Jacklyn, the company’s landing platform stationed offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. Not a bad day’s work.

New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines ignited at 3:55:01 PM ET Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and the rocket began its slow climb into space.

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Salvador Dalí's 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory
Salvador Dalí’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory

Every March and November, America reenacts one of its strangest magic tricks: we lose an hour, then months later we find it again behind the couch cushions of November, dusty but intact, like the coins that fell out of our pockets back in the 1980s when people still used cash.

Note: this is a sample of my writing that I am saving for posterity.

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