The agency has bumped up the wet dress rehearsal to increase its chances of launching within the February window, but could an Arctic blast interfere?

NASA is moving up a key test of its Artemis II rocket as unusually cold weather grips Central Florida, forcing officials to adjust schedules at Kennedy Space Center. The region is expecting sub-freezing temperatures arriving on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Forty years ago today, disaster struck NASA’s human spaceflight program when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after blastoff, killing all seven people onboard. The tragedy nearly brought the shuttle program to an early end.

Nuclear propulsion and power technologies could unlock new frontiers in missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA has reached an important milestone advancing nuclear propulsion that could benefit future deep space missions by completing a cold-flow test campaign of the first flight reactor engineering development unit since the 1960s.

Before NASA can decide a rocket launch date for Artemis 2, the giant SLS rocket has to ace a critical fueling test known as a wet dress rehearsal.