S8 Ep488: Bob Zimmerman of Behind the Black reports NASA successfully completed a wet dress rehearsal for the Artemis II mission targeting a March 6th launch, while a NASA report classified Boeing's Starliner failure as a severe Type A emergency prompting tighter c
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchster, Bob Zimmerman. He keeps the website behind the black. |
| 0:19.6 | Happy birthday, Bob Zimmerman, the month of February, your donations, $25, your subscriptions, $25, wonderful, because we've got some heavy lifting to do with regard NASA. |
| 0:31.8 | Bob, a very good evening to you. We've been waiting for some time for a wet dress rehearsal. What is that, and how did it go? |
| 0:40.0 | Good evening, John. |
| 0:41.9 | Yes, so NASA wants to send its second Artemis mission around the moon, not to orbit, but |
| 0:51.1 | the swing shot around the moon and then come back to Earth. |
| 0:53.3 | It would be a 10-day mission on an Orion capsule carrying four astronauts. Before they can launch the SLS rocket, |
| 1:00.5 | however, they needed to do what they call a wet dress rehearsal. That just means they simulate |
| 1:05.8 | a full dress rehearsal countdown, including fueling the rocket. They tried to do this about two weeks ago, |
| 1:12.6 | and they had some fuel leaks. And so they then did some, they replaced some fields. They did a |
| 1:19.0 | quick fueling test that appeared to solve the problem. And so yesterday they did a complete |
| 1:24.7 | wet dress rehearsal of second one. |
| 1:27.9 | It's an all day affair. |
| 1:29.1 | They went all day. |
| 1:30.6 | They had two minor issues during the day, though. |
| 1:33.2 | Nothing significant. |
| 1:34.5 | The first was for about a half hour, |
| 1:36.7 | they had some ground communications issues. |
| 1:39.6 | So they went to a backup communications until they got it resolved. |
| 1:42.7 | That wasn't a big deal. |
| 1:43.7 | They continued |
| 1:44.2 | without any problems. Then during the first countdown to T-minus 33 seconds, that's when the |
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