Plus: China advances its Mars Sample Return plan
| Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, NASA is pushing for an April 1 launch for Artemis 2, China is constructing its Mars Sample Return spacecraft and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust
NASA is pushing ahead with an Artemis 2 launch as soon as April 1 after completing repairs to a helium line that required rolling the rocket back from the pad.
At a March 12 briefing, agency officials said they completed a two-day flight readiness review for the Artemis 2 mission and agreed to proceed with launch preparations.
NASA currently plans to roll the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft from the Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, back to Launch Complex 39B on March 19. That would set up a launch as soon as April 1, the opening of the next launch period for the mission, which runs through April 6.
| | | | | | | CIVIL
| | China's Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission is entering flight hardware development, targeting a late 2028 launch to seek out biosignatures on the Red Planet.
NASA has selected the Centaur upper stage currently used on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket for future flights of the Space Launch System after Artemis 3.
A senior Chinese space scientist and delegate to the country's national congress is proposing the prioritization of an unprecedented orbiter mission to ice giant Neptune.
| | LAUNCH
| | China resumed orbital launch activity Thursday with a pair of missions lifting off from Hainan and Xichang spaceports, launching satellite internet and technology test satellites. The country had not conducted a launch since Feb. 12, when a Jielong-3 solid rocket sea launch carried the PRSC-EO2 remote sensing satellite and other passengers to orbit.
Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket successfully returned to flight March 11, launching a technology demonstration mission more than 10 months after the rocket's previous launch failed.
SpaceX is pushing back the first launch of the latest version of its Starship vehicle even as NASA is asking the company to accelerate work on a lunar lander version of the vehicle. | | | | | | | COMMERCIAL
| | The Starlab commercial space station has fully booked its commercial payload space as the joint venture developing it awaits the next phase of a NASA program.
Mantis Space, a New Mexico startup planning a constellation to supply solar power to spacecraft, emerged from stealth March 12 with $10 million in seed funding.
Anduril Industries said it plans to acquire ExoAnalytic Solutions, a company that operates one of the world's largest commercial networks of telescopes used to track satellites and space debris, in a move that expands the defense technology firm's push into national-security space programs. | | | | | |  | | SPONSORED CONTENT
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