Overview
- The fully stacked SLS and Orion are slated to begin the four-mile move to Pad 39B on Jan. 17 aboard Crawler-Transporter 2, a trip expected to take up to 12 hours.
- A late-January wet dress rehearsal will load more than 700,000 gallons of cryogenic propellants and rehearse the countdown with runs to T-33 seconds and T-30 seconds before draining.
- If the rehearsal succeeds, NASA will convene a Flight Readiness Review before selecting a date within the launch opportunities that open Feb. 6, with additional windows in March and April.
- Pre-rollout troubleshooting has been addressed, including replacement of a bent flight-termination cable, a swap and Jan. 5 test of an Orion hatch pressurization valve, and fixes to gaseous oxygen ground hardware.
- The 10-day mission will send Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a free-return lunar flyby to validate life-support and spacecraft systems, with NASA keeping schedule flexibility including a possible rollback if issues arise.