She added: “Our team has worked extremely hard to get us to this moment and I am so very proud of the work that they have done.” Just minutes earlier, NASA’s associate administrator Amit Kshatriya provided a major update, indicating the historic moon mission may take place on April 1. He said: “The team concluded that everything continues to look good and that there are no issues preventing us from pressing ahead at this point.”
Kshatriya said the highly anticipated mission enters its “pre-launch phase”.
The team, he added, is “in a strong posture and the mission remains on track”.
He also thanked all NASA employees, saying: “You are all instrumental. The skills that you carry, the judgement you built, the knowledge you hold, these are all the things that are in the lifeblood of the agency.
“This mission is going to fly on Wednesday because you are here.”
The mission marks the first time in over five decades that astronauts will travel around the Moon. It will take four astronauts – NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency – on a 10-day flight around the moon.
They will become the first people to blast into space on the giant new SLS rocket and fly in the Orion capsule.
While the mission is mainly a test mission, the crew will conduct some observations of the Moon and deep-space environment, paving the way for Artemis 3, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon’s surface.
