Four astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—conducted a dress rehearsal countdown inside their Orion spacecraft atop NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at Kennedy Space Center, preparing for the Artemis 2 lunar mission.

The complex test experienced some stops and starts, but Wiseman called it “extremely successful,” confirming the crew and vehicle are ready for launch procedures.

Artemis 2 is tentatively scheduled for early February, though delays could push it to March, with the mission set to orbit Earth for 25 hours before flying around the moon on a free-return trajectory and returning to a Pacific splashdown.

This flight will be the first crewed lunar journey since Apollo 17 in 1972 and will test Orion’s life support, propulsion, and rendezvous systems in preparation for Artemis 3, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar south pole by 2028, CBS News has reported.

The Artemis program faces competition from China, which plans a crewed moon landing by 2030, intensifying a new space race.