NASA fuels Artemis II moon rocket in test to clear the way for Super Bowl Sunday launch

Engineers began loading NASA's Artemis II moon rocket with more than 750,000 gallons of supercold propellants Monday in a critical countdown "wet dress" rehearsal to verify the giant rocket is leak-free and ready to send four astronauts on a trip around the moon as early as Feb. 8.

The practice countdown began Saturday evening — two days late because of frigid weather along Florida's Space Coast — and after a meeting Monday morning to assess the weather and the team's readiness to proceed, Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson cleared engineers to begin the remotely-controlled fueling operation.

The countdown was timed for a simulated launch at 9 p.m. EST. But engineers planned to continue several hours past that to run through several recycle procedures intended to make sure the team is ready to handle any problems and delays that might crop up during a real countdown.

Depending on the results of a review of the fueling test data, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen could be cleared for launch as early as 11:20 p.m. on Feb. 8 — Super Bowl Sunday — the first of just three days left in the February launch period. If the Space Launch System (SLS) isn't off the ground by Feb. 11, the flight will slip to early March.

The SLS, the rocket NASA plans to use to send Artemis astronauts to the moon aboard Orion crew capsules, is the most powerful operational launcher in the world. It is a towering 332-foot-tall rocket powered by two strap-on solid fuel boosters and four main engines burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen fuel that generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

The rocket's first and so far only mission came in 2022 when it was launched on an unpiloted test flight around the moon and back. In the campaign leading up to launch, engineers ran into a variety of problems ranging from fuel leaks to unexpected propellant flow behavior in the launch pad's plumbing. Launch was delayed for months while engineers worked to resolve the problems.

For the rocket's second launch, multiple upgrades and improvements have been implemented, and Blackwell-Thompson said she was optimistic the fueling test would go well.

"Why do we think that we'll be successful? It's the lessons that we learned," she said last week.

"Artemis I was the test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign, getting to launch," she said. "And the things that we learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled into the way in which we intend to load the Artemis II vehicle."

The fuel loading operation was expected to be complete by around 4:30 p.m. with the tanks in the core and second stages topped off and in "stable replenish" mode. During an actual moon launch countdown, the completion of fueling would set the stage for the astronauts to head for the pad to strap into their Orion capsule.

But no one would be boarding for the fueling test. Wiseman and his crewmates remained in pre-flight medical quarantine at the Johnson Space Center in Houston and were not expected to fly to Florida until later this week, after the dress rehearsal data is assessed.