Main Engine Cut Off - T+326: Artemis II Underway

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

Artemis II is underway with a spectacular first day. This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 32 executive producers—Donald, Matt, David, Joel, Frank, Better Every Day Studios, Natasha Tsakos, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Lee, Fred, Will and Lars from Agile, Ryan, Warren, The Astrogators at SEE, Pat, Joakim, Miles O’Brien, Steve, Jan, Stealth Julian, Kris, Theo and Violet, Russell, Josh from Impulse, Joonas, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters. Topics NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage (Official Broadcast) - YouTube Artemis II Flight Update: Perigee Raise Maneuver Complete; NASA to Hold Press Conference Artemis II Flight Update: Apogee Raise Burn Complete, Crew Looks Ahead to Proximity Operations Artemis II Flight Update: Proximity Operations Complete, Perigee Raise Burn Up Next Artemis II Flight Update: Crew and Ground Teams Successfully Troubleshoot Orion’s Toilet Artemis II Flight Update: Perigee Raise Burn Complete The Show Like the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack! Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Follow @[e-mail] on Mastodon Listen to MECO Headlines Listen to Off-Nominal Join the Off-Nominal Discord Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhere Subscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off Newsletter Artwork photo by NASA/Bill Ingalls Work with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Artemis 2 is underway, and this is Main Ninja Cutoff. I'm Anthony Blangelo. Let's talk about it. Day 1 is amazing. Everything went so fantastic. Almost a perfect launch flow. They worked a couple of issues. No issues with fueling. I was honestly shocked. I thought they would encounter a couple of issues with the hydrogen situation, considering the fact that they rolled this thing back to the VAB, rolled it back out, and went for the launch attempt. So that was amazing. Did not expect that at all. A couple of issues they worked during the flow, including a flight termination system issue that they solved by getting a piece of hardware out of the VAB that was from the shuttle era, some legacy hardware that could communicate with the flight termination system or receive commands from the range as well to verify the flight termination system. That was a crazy story that I feel like we needed more info on. They also had a couple of launch abort system battery things they were checking out.

They think it was a sensor issue. But another that held up the launch, they got to the T-minus 10-minute hold, and it kind of sounded like they all were looking around mission control or launch control and saying, are we ready? Like, is this actually, we're actually doing this thing? So they got off a few minutes later than the start of the window, because they had one more pretty extensive round of go-no-go checks, and then a very, a very epically stated decision to go for launch.

So that was awesome that the team got that moment of a triumph that, you know, the first time crew boarded this thing, they went off and did the launch. Man, if SLS worked like that all the time, things would feel a lot different. You know, many of the criticisms would remain. It doesn't change the fact that this is way behind schedule, way over budget, slow flight rate, even if Jared Isaacman is able to change some things at NASA. But if it worked like this all the time, it would be a lot more of a conflict. feeling, which honestly is how I feel today. This is a truly awesome mission to watch. The crew is a very lovable crew. A lot of fun to watch those four. And there's an old school feel to this, right? You're watching the live stream. You're seeing these shots from within Orion. A very,

very old school feel. Just feels like NASA should feel, you know? Not to say the space station's boring, but I mean, it's kind of boring. You know what I'm saying? This is different. It feels different. I'm going to watch this live stream for nine days straight. Maybe I'll just sleep when the crew sleeps because otherwise I'm glued to this thing, listening to everything they're talking about. But let's go over a couple of the highlights since they got to orbit. They got on orbit.

Everything looked good with the ICPS burn. They did some parity rays maneuvers. They did have a temporary communications dropout early on in the mission. It seemed to happen at a Tidre's handover moment where they were switching between different satellite systems. So it doesn't think. sound particularly concerning, something they're looking into, but it did kind of sound like

one of those things that happens when you're switching between Tegrois satellites. And then what was the next thing? Well, we found out pretty quickly that the toilet had an issue. What it turned out was that there are two different fans on board the toilet. I have some reporting from somebody who knows the toilet that there's a fan for the P that pulls the P away. and there's one fan for the poop that draws the poop away. There are two different things. They never mix. And the P-side got jammed up, so that fan was inoperable.

So they were troubleshooting this to see if they could get into the fan to resolve the jam. Don't have a ton of technical info, but as the crew woke up this morning, or overnight sometime, maybe the crew was still awake. I was sleeping. But they did resolve that issue. So toilet back to 100%. it doesn't seem like that was a thing that would have caused the mission to end. I think if the toilet was not working at all, I wonder where they would be.

But this is why we have this 24-hour Earth orbit checkout. They wanted to check out the life support systems, things like the toilet, other crew systems on board communications. They've done a test this morning of the emergency backup communication system. So they're using this orbit to check out all these systems, and everything seems to be going well. troubleshooted that toilet issue and they are go. They are go to go. One of the most interesting things last night was the proximity operations around ICPS. So after they did the Apogee Raysburn to boost themselves up to that, you know, 70,000 kilometer orbit. So it's a super elliptical orbit. They're up at the high end right now as I record to you, record this for you right now. They are

nearly at Apogee. I think they're just a touch past Apogee. and they're going to be coasting down when they get back down to the low side of their orbit tonight, they'll fire the engine again, hopefully if they're go for TLI and set up for the lunar flyby. But once they did that Apogee Rays maneuver, the ICPS was then separated from Orion, and they used that as a target to do proximity operations test. So they were maneuvering the spacecraft manually. If you didn't watch this last night, I would highly recommend going back in the live stream or wherever NASA has it saved on YouTube and watching this.

It was so fun to watch Victor Glover drive this thing in real time. You could see the docking cameras. You could see him working at the station. You could hear all the crew reports. They've got this great live audio from the spacecraft. Loving how much access we're getting there. It took a while to get the cameras online during the mission, but loving the access we're getting to the control loops.

And again, this proximity operations test sounds boring maybe to you, but I would go watch it. It was really fun to watch them. maneuver the spacecraft to hear them report about it, compare it to other spacecraft saying it's a lot smoother than Dragon and Soyuz, and that it's actually better than the simulation, which is always a good thing to hear. So very, very cool. They maneuvered basically to the front of ICPS first. There's a docking target there, basically where it interfaces with Orion, and they pulled within 10 meters at that spot, and then they actually kind of went around to the side of ICPS. There's a docking target over on the side,

so they use that as a test to navigate over to that other target. Everything seemed to be working really well, a lot of good reports out of the crew, and it was just very awesome to see this kind of thing happening on a spacecraft that's so far away from Earth. We did start to get this morning some really great live views of the Earth in the background. So the cameras on this thing are, you know, in addition to the one in the cabin and any that the crew might handhold, on the ends of the solar array wings, there are cameras. So sometimes it's hard to get those camera shots,

especially when they're in where they're at in space right now, very far from Earth and very far from the moon. Oftentimes there's nothing in those views, so people are wondering why we're seeing such a large amount of the 3D model visualization on the live stream. It's because there's nothing really to look at in the solar ray wings most of the time, right? You see the spacecraft nearby,

but you don't always see the Earth or the Moon in the background. We did get some glimpses of both today. The Crescent Earth was just looking incredible, and it was a real treat both for me and the crew to wake up to. I do want to, there was a whole bunch of stuff going on after they've done, or they woke up to prep for this Paragy-Rase maneuver. So they are in this orbit right now where they're 70,000 kilometers from Earth. Is that right? I keep saying that, and I'm pretty sure that's right.

Let me do, 38,000 miles to KM. How high did they actually get up? Yeah, they were about 60. I thought they were going to be a lot higher than that. They're about 60,000 kilometers. So they wake up. in prep for that to get ready for that that Paragy raised maneuver because the low side of their orbit was actually intersecting the atmosphere at this point, I think. I think it was like 11 kilometers

up or something like that. So they did this paragy raised maneuver to push them out of the atmosphere effectively. I wonder if that means they were on a suborbital trajectory. That's fun. And then, so that was done with the orbital maneuvering system, not the main engine of Orion. It looked like they used the smaller engines off to the side. Did that, I think it was about a minute-long burn, and that sets them up for the TLI burn tonight. The ICPS itself is going for disposal burn, and it will deploy CubeSats,

but then it will come back into Earth and re-enter. And when they come around again, they're going to fire the main engine this time for TLI. Now, they did a series of other tests and checkouts with the ground control crew, so they were testing some backup communications. But they also just had some nice reports of what they were seeing.

They had a view out the window of Earth. I was going to play a little clip from the live stream of just hearing Christina Koch describe what she's seeing. So let's see if we can get this audio for you. Yeah, I just wanted to describe for you guys the beauty that we're seeing. You can actually make out the coastline of the continent. You can make out rivers because of the sun glare. You can see high thunder clouds.

And all the while, you can see the entire Terminator. and you can see the South Pole lit up. It's just phenomenal. And even from this far, you can make out a slight pink hue along the Terminator. It is just absolutely phenomenal. You guys look great. Just love those reports,

love hearing from the crew, those kind of things, because it's something we all, you know, my age grew up kind of thinking about the Apollo missions and watching all the documentaries and you've got all that old footage of the crews on their way out to the moon and being that far from Earth and seeing it as small as it is from Orion right now. It's a really cool experience to be doing this live and having the access to a live broadcast the entire mission, even if a lot of it is the visualization, like I said, when there are visually interesting things, they seem to be

cutting to it. Now, the launch broadcast, a lot of thoughts out there on the internet of how well they pulled that off. Shot selection was a little wild, so definitely some room for improvement there. but in terms of the live broadcast from the spacecraft right now, I'm loving it and I'm pretty hooked. I'm thrilled. This was a really great day. A really big boost for Artemis II and the whole team. I mean, there's definitely a different vibe to it, you know,

in the post-ignition era here. There's a lot more hopefulness around this launch than I think would have felt if this just went off in, you know, last year even, and we were staring down the barrel of the roadmap, as it were. I feel much better about watching this mission with the insight that we're heading in a better direction with this program. And also, just the fact that they pulled this off on the first launch attempt, everything seems to go really well. They're not having any major issues here. You know, there's a lot of the mission to go. They still have to do this TLI go-no-go decision.

That's going to be a big deal tonight, so that'll probably be the next time that we've got a lot to talk about. but it's just it makes you wonder if this program executed like this all the time what are the conversations we'd be having you know as much as you might hate this program so I know there's a lot of you out there this is an epic mission and it will be remembered really fondly in the annals of history you know I mean I had a five-year-old and 18-month-old glued to the TV yesterday as this thing lifted off and a five-year-old's thrilled to check in with the astronauts every time. time he can. It's fun to see it through those eyes too, right? Because he doesn't care about any of the

nonsense that we've been debating for decades. So I think that's kind of the thing I've been reflecting on is that I've spent literally a decade in two weeks talking about this program on this show. And you know the characterization of most of that, right? But at the same time, that does wash away, at least for a couple hours when this thing lifts off is taking people out into deep space. It's really cool and, you know, appreciate the good and the bad, I guess, is my point. So we'll see where it goes from here. I wanted to throw the mics on this morning a little bit and capture what's going on with the mission, where I'm at, how it feels to be watching one of these live. It is a fun era to be in. I'm excited to be back in the lunar era with all y'all.

So with that, thank you all so much for listening. And thanks for the support over at Managing Codoff.com slash support. There are 32 executive producers of this episode. Thanks to Donald, Matt, David, Joel, Frank, Better Everyday Studios, Natasha Saccoes, Tim Dodd, David Ashinot, Lee, Fred, Will & Lars from Agileile, Ryan, Warren, The Astrogator's at SEE, Pat, Joe Kim, Miles O'Brien, Steve Yon, Stealth Julian, Chris, Theo and Violet, Russell, Josh from Impulse, Eunice, and four anonymous, IGECA producers. Thank you all so much for the support, as always, and I'll talk to you soon. I don't know, I don't know when, I don't know what about, but I feel like I'll throw the mics on a couple times on this mission and update you on where things are at, so enjoy. Thank you.