Launch Preview: SLS, Falcon 9, Atlas V, and Soyuz launches comprise busy launch manifest

Nine launches are scheduled this week, with rockets expected to liftoff from Florida, California, Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. Most notably, NASA's long-awaited Artemis II mission is scheduled to launch the first humans to the Moon in over 50 years on Wednesday. SpaceX has four Starlink missions scheduled for the week, with Falcon 9 launching two from Florida and two from California.

China had issued a NOTAM for a launch from Jiuquan on Monday, March 30. This NOTAM was later found to be the debut flight of CAS Space's Kinetica 2 rocket, though other speculation in the past days had centered on Space Pioneer's Tianlong 3, also nearing readiness for its debut flight. The danger zones in the NOTAM, indicating a southerly polar trajectory, did not exactly match those of a Chang Zheng 2C or 2D, which have also been used to launch on polar trajectories from Jiuquan.

The Kinetica 2, also known as Lijian-2, launched successfully from Site 140 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Monday, March 30, at 11:00 UTC, carrying three payloads into Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).