NASA’s Artemis II mission is rolling toward the launch pad, marking a major step toward humanity’s next journey around the Moon.

SpaceX early Sunday morning launched its first Twilight rideshare flight from California, launching satellites for NASA, an Internet-of-Things services company and an experiment to 3-D print a boom in space.

NASA is planning on rolling out the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to the launch pad on Jan. 17 for a launch as soon as Feb. 5, Space.com is reporting.

NASA announced that the earliest launch window for Artemis II is Feb. 6, 2026, with 12 more possible dates available from February-April. The Artemis mission, a followup to the Apollo program, hopes to have astronauts back on the moon’s surface by 2027.

NASA has confirmed the upcoming milestones for its historic Artemis II mission—the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, sending four astronauts on a lunar flyby for the first time in over 50 years—with rollout and Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) to set the stage for a potential launch in February.

NASA launched a new satellite mission into low Earth orbit on Sunday to study the atmospheres of exoplanets and their host stars. The mission, codenamed Pandora, lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:44 a.

NASA could be sending a crew on the Orion spacecraft out past the moon in less than a month if everything falls into place. But first the agency has to get its rocket to the launch pad. That could as early as next Saturday when the mobile launcher topped with the Space Launch System rocket and Orion could make the four-mile slow roll atop the crawler-transporter 2 from the Vehicle Assembly

FLORIDA TODAY's Space Team provides live blog coverage of all 2026 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center.