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Join me to watch the NASA livestream of the historic Artemis II launch, sending people back to circle the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
If the location changes last minute based on room availability at South there will be a sign on the door and we will be somewhere in the Olympic Hall (OLY) building
The time and date of this event may change: launch windows [1] depend on suitable weather and every technical detail going correctly. Please visit here and check BlueSky [2] and West Seattle Blog [3] for the most recent update. (This does mean I have several places to update, so bear with me on change announcements.)
Links to NASA’s coverage schedule and livestream [4].
I recommend children watch this event on a ~20 minute delay. If you do not know why I recommend that, research the Challenger mission.
Map to the Jerry M Brockey center:
The Launch
Why do we care?
We haven’t sent people back to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.
This crew includes four amazing astronauts with a lot of firsts: Victor Glover [5], the first Black astronaut to go to the Moon; Christina Koch [6], the first woman to go to the Moon; Jeremy Hansen [7], the first non-US citizen to go to the Moon (Canadian); and Reid Weisman [8].
People are not landing this time, that is planned for Artemis IV [9] maybe in 2028.
The crew will be farther from Earth than any crew has ever been: they go a little bit farther out in their flyby of the Moon than previous missions.
This mission prepares us to be able to land on the Moon.
We no longer have the Apollo technology, we could not just dust that off and use it anytime over the last 50 years. The technology had to be reinvented. And we know more now, so the technology has changed dramatically.
We will be able to test the safety systems for the Artemis program.
We’re going to get some more neat pictures of the far side of the Moon. Sure, we have sent satellites to do this, but people are active observers and can notice interesting things to photograph, whereas a satellite will only take the images it is pre-programmed to take.
No one under the ages of about 53 has been alive while astronauts could get to the Moon. A significant portion of the population doesn’t know what it feels like in real time to have people achieve this marvel of spaceflight. To us, it is history. It is in books and videos. The Artemis II mission is history in the making. Come watch it launch!