Watch NASA fuel up its Artemis 2 moon rocket today in critical prelaunch test

NASA's Artemis II Live Views from Kennedy Space Center - YouTube

NASA will fuel up its huge Artemis 2 moon rocket today (Feb. 2), and you can watch the crucial prelaunch test live.

On Saturday night (Jan. 31), the agency officially began Artemis 2's "wet dress rehearsal," a two-day-long exercise that runs through the key procedures and operations that will precede an actual liftoff. Perhaps the most important of these operations is fueling — loading up Artemis 2's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with more than 700,000 gallons (2.65 million liters) of super-cold liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellant.

The Artemis 2 wet dress is targeting a simulated launch time tonight of 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT on Feb. 3). Tanking operations are scheduled to begin about 10 hours before that — so, around 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT). You can watch live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA; the agency is livestreaming the wet dress 24/7.

You shouldn't necessarily expect everything to go smoothly today. Fueling up a giant rocket is a tricky operation, after all — especially when one of the propellants is liquid hydrogen, whose constituent molecules are tiny. Liquid hydrogen can escape through the smallest of fissures, as we saw during the wet dress rehearsals for Artemis 1.

Artemis 1 was originally targeted to launch in early 2022, but hydrogen leaks discovered during multiple wet dresses pushed things back considerably. In the end, everything worked out: Artemis 1 launched in November 2022, successfully sending an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back to Earth.

A lot more is riding on Artemis 2. It will carry four astronauts — NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen — on a roughly 10-day trip around the moon and back to Earth. It will be the first crewed mission to lunar realms since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

NASA is currently targeting Feb. 8 for Artemis 2's liftoff, which will take place from Launch Complex-39B at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The SLS-Orion stack rolled out to Pad 39B from KSC's cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building on Jan. 17.

There are backup launch days on Feb. 10 and Feb. 11. If Artemis 2 can't fly during that stretch, additional windows are available in March and April.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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