March 31: Tomorrow, We Go to the Moon

The countdown clock is ticking. A 322-foot rocket sits on Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center, its engines fueling, its four-person crew in quarantine down the road. Tomorrow, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, at 6:24 p.m. EDT — if the weather holds and the hardware cooperates — humanity returns to the Moon for the first time in 54 years.

On Friday, March 27, four astronauts flew their T-38 jets into Kennedy Space Center from Houston and stepped onto the tarmac at the Launch and Landing Facility. Commander Reid Wiseman looked up at the waiting crowd and said exactly what the moment called for: "Hey, let's go to the Moon!" The countdown began Monday afternoon, a 48-hour sequence of fueling, systems checks, and final verification that will culminate Wednesday evening. The crew — Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — remains in medical quarantine, following a controlled sleep schedule, eating carefully, completing final medical checks. Forecasters are giving an 80 percent chance of favorable weather. Everything, at last, appears ready. "We are ready to go," Wiseman said Sunday from quarantine. "But not for one second do we have an expectation that we are going. We will go when this vehicle tells us it's ready."

Fifty-Four Years Between Footsteps

Artemis II will not land on the Moon. This is a test flight — a crewed shakedown of NASA's Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket on their first voyage with human beings aboard. The mission calls for the crew to spend 24 hours in a high Earth orbit verifying life support systems, then fire the engine for a translunar injection burn that will send them arcing toward the Moon. They will fly around the far side — a view no human being has ever had: the complete disc of the lunar far side, in one frame — and use the Moon's gravity to slingshot them back toward Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10. Along the way, if they launch Wednesday, they will surpass the record for the farthest any human being has ever traveled from Earth — 252,799 miles, breaking the mark set by the crew of Apollo 13 during their harrowing emergency return in 1970. Victor Glover will become the first person of color to travel to the Moon's vicinity. Christina Koch will be the first woman. Jeremy Hansen will be the first Canadian. The mission carries within it the stories of everyone who was not allowed to be part of the first era of lunar exploration.

The arc from the first human spaceflight to tomorrow's launch is one of the great stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. Alan Shepard made America's first tentative reach toward space on May 5, 1961 — a 15-minute suborbital hop in a capsule barely larger than a phone booth, just 23 days after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space for the Soviet Union. Eight years, two months, and 26 days later, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon and said words that will be quoted as long as there are people to read them. Between 1969 and 1972, twelve American men walked on the Moon. Then Gene Cernan scratched his daughter's initials in the lunar dust, climbed back into the lunar module Challenger, and promised: "God willing, as we shall return." For 54 years, no human being has gone back. Tomorrow, the promise comes due.

NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft illuminated at night at Launch Complex 39B, bathed in floodlights against a dark sky with the Moon visible above

NASA's Artemis II Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft at Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center — the same pad that launched Apollo 10 in 1969. Tomorrow, the 48-hour countdown reaches its final seconds.

📺 How to Watch — and How to Celebrate

Watch Artemis II launch live on Wednesday, April 1: Pre-launch coverage (tanking operations) begins at 7:45 a.m. EDT. Full mission coverage begins at 12:50 p.m. EDT on NASA+, the NASA YouTube channel, and NASA's official social media accounts on Facebook, X, and Twitch. Launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. EDT, with a two-hour window. Amazon Prime will also carry coverage of the lunar flyby and splashdown.

🍩 Krispy Kreme's Artemis II Doughnut is available at participating shops nationwide through April 2nd only — the limited-edition Original Glazed® dipped in cosmic blue vanilla-flavored icing, topped with OREO® crunch, white nonpareils, cookies-and-creme buttercreme, and a bold red NASA-logo chevron. Also available as part of an Artemis II Specialty Dozen. Your tastebuds are cleared for launch. 🚀

There is something about watching a rocket launch that reaches past the rational and into something older. It is the same impulse that moved people to build Stonehenge to catch the solstice light, to set the Pyramid of Kukulcán to mark the equinox, to scratch figures of stars onto cave walls tens of thousands of years ago. We have always looked up. Tomorrow, four people will go. They will look back at a small blue world hanging in the dark, and forward at a grey and ancient Moon that has gazed down on all of human history. And somewhere on its surface, undisturbed by 54 years of time, the initials T D C wait in the dust — exactly where Gene Cernan left them — for the day we keep our promise to return.