NASA has targeted Thursday, February 19, 2026, at 8:30 p.m. EST for the Artemis II wet dress rehearsal — the final major systems verification before the agency's first crewed lunar flyby in more than half a century.
Launch controllers began the nearly 50-hour countdown sequence on February 17 at 6:40 p.m. EST at Kennedy Space Center, Florida. If the rehearsal proceeds on schedule, it would clear the path to an earliest launch opportunity of March 6, 2026 for the actual crewed mission.
A wet dress rehearsal — the "wet" referring to the loading of cryogenic propellants into the rocket's tanks — is the most comprehensive test short of an actual launch attempt. For Artemis II, the exercise will walk the launch team through loading liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the Space Launch System core stage and upper stage, running a full terminal countdown sequence, and demonstrating the ability to recycle the clock and drain the tanks safely. The team will conduct two terminal count sequences, pausing at T-minus 1 minute 30 seconds and T-minus 33 seconds before recycling to T-minus 10 minutes. The total test window is four hours.
Notably, the four Artemis II astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will not participate in the rehearsal itself. Ground teams will conduct spacecraft closeout procedures and hatch closure in their place.
The test follows resolution of a technical setback from a February 12 test, when teams identified a suspected filter issue in ground support equipment affecting liquid hydrogen flow. Technicians replaced the component before proceeding to the rehearsal attempt. That engineers diagnosed and corrected the problem within days is a sign of the program's operational maturity — a sharp contrast to the multiple scrub cycles and extended delays that pushed the Artemis I uncrewed test flight through repeated wet dress rehearsal attempts in 2022 before finally launching in November of that year.
