Where does Artemis II launch from?

The question comes phrased in the future tense, but Artemis II is history: it launched on April 1, 2026, at 18:35 Florida local time from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, on the US Atlantic coast. On board were four people: commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch, all from NASA, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, from the Canadian Space Agency. The flight lasted about ten days and took them around the Moon and back to Earth.

Pad 39B is one of two launch pads in Complex 39 and has its own lunar history: Apollo 10 was the first mission to launch from it, on May 18, 1969, and in 1973 the three Skylab station crews launched from there. For Artemis it was modernized under a guiding principle, the "clean pad": each rocket's needs, including technician access, are met by towers or other structures that carry it there. For the SLS, that structure is the mobile launcher, with its umbilical arms, which travels from the Vehicle Assembly Building atop a crawler-transporter.

Pad 39B was not new to the program either: Artemis I launched from it, uncrewed, on November 16, 2022. After the Artemis program's restructuring in February 2026, NASA wants to fly the lunar landing missions with an ascent configuration as stable as possible, with an upper stage and pad systems as close as possible to the rocket's "Block 1" version, to cut development and production risk and sustain at least one landing per year starting with Artemis IV, planned for 2028.