What to expect during the first day of the Artemis II mission

Uploaded on March 27, 2026

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What to expect during the first day of the Artemis II mission

The 26 hours of the Artemis II mission will be very busy. Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen explains what will happen, from launching to orbiting Earth to heading towards the Moon.  (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)

Just thought I'd share about the first hours of the Artemis II mission, because it is going to be such a busy time frame for us as a crew.

So, day of launch, we've got a lot of checks and medical things and some briefings to get through in the morning and then get suited up, get out to the pad, we get strapped into the vehicle.

Once we launch, it's about an eight-minute ride to orbit. We'll get rid of the SLS rocket, we'll be done with that, and we'll be on top of our upper stage, which will be taking care of the initial accelerations that we need to execute the mission.

We have a bunch of checks we're going to do. Certainly, the vehicle, the solar panels, the batteries are charging. Life support system looks like it's working.

Christina and I have a bunch of cabin configuration to do in that first 45 minutes, checking out some systems, like the water systems, getting the toilet commissioned, getting out some of the electronics and being able to power the devices. All of that needs to be set up and plugged in.

We fly around the Earth halfway, and if everything is good at that halfway mark, and that's about 45 minutes into the mission, then we burn the engines again, accelerate, which will keep us in space.

If we don't like what's going on, that's one of the options where we could come back to Earth.

Ideally we’ll accelerate from that point, and we'll go out to a highly elliptical orbit.

The Space Station is at 400 km. We'll be going out to 60,000 km. That gives us a day in space, before we have the opportunity to come back to Earth.

But of course, we train for the unexpected and make sure we have a good plan to manage all of the potential systems failures or systems that just don't perform how we think thought they were going to. And maybe we're not 100% confident that we can survive another eight days in the spacecraft. Those are the types of things that would cause us to come home.

If we don’t want to come home, and if we get into that day long orbit, we get off of the upper stage of the rocket and we use it as a simulated lunar lander, and we fly around it checking out the manual control systems, characterizing how the vehicle flies. But ensuring that we know how to dock this vehicle manually in the future.

We can do everything but actually connect to it.

It's about an 18-hour day. And then we try and get a four-hour nap, so we really hope that we will be able to fall asleep amidst all that excitement of the day, because then we have to get up, and we come all the way down to about 200 km above the surface of the Earth. 

And that is where we accelerate, and that is what will send us on our way to the Moon.

Our job is to characterize this vehicle and make sure it does everything it was designed to do, that humans can live and work on board it, and hand the baton on to the Artemis III crew.

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