CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Before Artemis III flies, its four astronauts are due to rehearse the part of a launch nobody wants to use: the walk from the top of the mobile launcher to the emergency exit.
NASA said on Wednesday it will give an update at 2 p.m. EDT on Friday, Oct. 23, at Kennedy Space Center on what it calls Artemis acceleration. Administrator Jared Isaacman, Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya and Artemis program manager Jeremy Parsons will take part. The agency said the briefing will cover Artemis III, which will send four astronauts to low Earth orbit next year, and how plans to return Americans to the Moon by 2028 are progressing.
The distinction matters. Artemis III is no longer a landing mission; it is a test of the systems a landing will need, and its goal in orbit is to rehearse rendezvous and docking with one or both of the human landing systems. The Artemis III crew of Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas and the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano will ride an Orion capsule on the Space Launch System, with the landing itself left to Artemis IV.
The hardware is moving. In a status update posted Tuesday, NASA said engineers finished stacking the twin solid rocket boosters on Sept. 30 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, boosters that supply more than 75 percent of the rocket’s thrust at liftoff. The final booster segments are on the mobile launcher in what NASA calls a “short stack,” and all four RS-25 engines are installed on the core stage, which is to be joined to the boosters in the coming weeks.
That partial stack will roll to Launch Pad 39B for a tanking test in the coming months, NASA said, so the launch team can practice loading propellant. The crew will use the visit for a launch day rehearsal: suiting up in crew quarters, driving to the pad, ascending the mobile launcher and walking the route they would take in an emergency during the countdown. The pad’s flame deflector is being refurbished after what NASA described as minimal damage from the Artemis II launch.
Not everything has arrived. The Artemis III spacer, which stands in for upper-stage dimensions, and two adapters are due to ship to Kennedy only early next year, NASA said, for a mission it says will fly next year.
NASA’s documents say nothing about whether either lander will be ready for Orion to dock with, which is the one question the crew’s rehearsal cannot answer.
