Last mentioned: Mar 20, 2026
Artemis I Success
Uncrewed Orion capsule successfully orbits the Moon and returns to Earth.
Artemis II Launch
Target window for the first crewed flight of the SLS and Orion.
Artemis III
Planned mission to land the first humans on the lunar South Pole.
Target Launch
Earliest projected launch window for the Artemis II lunar mission.
Pad Arrival
The SLS/Orion stack successfully reaches Launch Pad 39B.
VAB Repairs
Engineers complete final maintenance on Orion life support components.
Rollout Delay
High winds at Kennedy Space Center prevent the SLS from moving to the pad.
Technical Reviews
NASA conducts extensive testing on Orion heat shield and life support systems.
NASA has returned the Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the launch pad after addressing technical issues and weather-related delays. This mission, the first crewed lunar flight in over 50 years, is now targeting an early April liftoff following a successful rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building.
NASA has officially set an April 2026 target for the Artemis II mission, marking the first time humans will return to the lunar vicinity since 1972. The mission will send a crew of four on a high-stakes flyby to validate the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft for future deep-space exploration.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Artemis II across our space & defense coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running space & defense beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where Artemis II was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |