Follow along live as NASA sends astronauts into the moon's orbit with the launch of its key Artemis II mission on April 1.

The countdown to launch of the Artemis II mission, NASA's first piloted moonshot in half a century, proceeded smoothly as engineers and technicians prepared the agency's giant Space Launch System rocket and Orion crew capsule for fueling and blastoff.

Under a mission scheduled to launch Wednesday evening, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen are set to trace a figure-eight around the moon aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft — an endeavor known as Artemis II — making them the first people to travel this far since the Apollo missions of the 1970s.

Everything seems to be going NASA's way as the countdown proceeds toward a Wednesday launch of astronauts' first trip to the moon in more than half a century

NASA says that a flight termination issue has been resolved and Artemis II is good to launch on Wednesday. U.S. Space Force Brigadier General Nick Hague joins CBS News to discuss.

The mission will test life support and other systems of Orion, a space capsule that is to be America’s vehicle for lunar journeys. Once there, future NASA crews will use other spacecraft, built by SpaceX or Blue Origin,

It’s humanity’s first flight to the moon since 1972. In a throwback to Apollo, NASA’s Artemis II mission will send four astronauts on a lunar fly-around. They’ll hurtle several thousand miles beyond the moon,

NASA' Artemis II mission plans to be the first crewed lunar mission in decades, set to loop astronauts around the moon and back.