SLS and the Orion spacecraft are fully stacked together inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center. Once final tests are complete, the launch vehicle will be rolled out onto the pad at Launch Complex-39A, which should take about 10 hours.

The Artemis III follow-up mission plans to do an actual crewed landing, but that's run into some scheduling problems. The initial plan was to use a modified version of SpaceX's Starship, specially developed for NASA under the Human Lander System (HLS) program.

NASA says it is continuing to prepare for a possible Artemis 2 launch as soon as February, but with remarkably little publicity for the historic mission.

For reentering the Earth, the crew will let gravity do its job. They will endure speed and temperature on their journey back home before splashing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. At the site, a recovery team will be awaiting the team's arrival and will bring the crew members back to the shore.

NASA is on the verge of sending astronauts back toward the Moon for the first time in more than half a century, and that choice is reshaping the rest of its exploration agenda. With Artemis 2 poised to fly before any new human mission to Mars is seriously funded,

NASA's Artemis II will celebrate America's 250th anniversary while flying the first humans to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA has set a date for a return to the Moon, as part of the U.S. space agency’s ambitious Artemis program.

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