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Officials reported the moon rocket was doing well on the pad,
and the weather looked promising. Forecasters put the odds of
favorable conditions at 80%.
“Everybody's pretty excited and understands the significance of
this launch,” said senior test director Jeff Spaulding.
The four astronauts assigned to the Artemis II mission will
become the first lunar visitors since Apollo 17 in 1972. They’ll
zip around the moon without landing or even orbiting, and come
straight back.
It's the closest NASA has come to launching Artemis II. Hydrogen
fuel leaks bumped the flight from February to March, then
clogged helium lines pushed it to April. The space agency has
only a handful of days every month to send the three Americans
and one Canadian to the moon.
Confident that all of these problems are fixed, the launch team
plans to begin fueling the 32-story Space Launch System rocket
on Wednesday morning for an evening send-off.
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