The service’s Space Launch Delta 45 is tracking by weather and rocket safety conditions for NASA’s launch out of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. There will be 28 crew members in the mission control center, in contrast to the four or five members used for a typical launch, service officials told reporters during a roundtable Monday. 

Boeing’s Space Launch System rocket doesn’t have an autonomous flight safety system, which would automatically stop the mission in an emergency. That means more eyes are needed to monitor key data on the rocket and in the skies. 

“When you don't have an autonomous flight safety system, you have to call up multiple range assets and resources for that function,” said Lt. Col. Gregory Allen, 1st Range Operations Squadron commander. “So that is exactly why we have so many personnel on console for this.”

The last Apollo mission in 1972 marked the last crewed mission to the moon. The Space Force, since it was created in 2019, has taken on a major role in rocket launches and oversees military and U.S. government missions from Florida’s Cape Canaveral and California's Vandenberg Space Force Base. Additionally, the 1st Air Force’s Detachment 3, the only Defense Department unit tasked with rescue and recovery of commercial space crews, has four helicopters ready at Patrick Space Force Base in case the crew needs to abort the mission.

Service officials told reporters that airmen and guardians are ready for Wednesday’s launch and opened an emergency operations center manned with first responders, bomb technicians, and others they can “surge” if needed, said Col. Chris Bulson, the deputy commander for installation support. 

“SLD 45 has a robust team of folks on standby for this particular mission that are well versed with the SLS rocket, the systems on board, and have great teamwork with our detachment three partners to assist them should a recovery be necessary,” Bulson said.

Given the large public crowds for the event, Space Launch Delta 45 is also preparing for more security patrols and more people to manage crowds on land as well as boaters watching from the ocean, he added.

The Delta’s 45th Weather Squadron has forecasted favorable conditions for Wednesday’s launch. Unlike the National Weather Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Space Force’s squadron uses guardians who focus on specific factors and local weather that would affect crews, missions, and launch vehicles and pads.

They also monitor last-minute winds and conditions in case the Artemis II crew needs to abort mid-flight, Col. Douglas Oltmer, the weather squadron commander, told reporters. 

“If the winds are too strong on shore, and they do have to abort en route, they will need to land over the water for the emergency,” Oltmer said. “So that's one of the things we're forecasting for on our end as well.”

The squadron’s weather forecasting doesn’t stop once the crews enter outer space. The Space Force has a team alongside the 1st Air Force’s Detachment 3 aboard the Navy’s USS John Murtha transport that will monitor recovery conditions for the crew when they splash down in the Pacific Ocean after their 10-day journey. The four astronauts are scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center sometime after 6:24 p.m. on Wednesday, and are scheduled to return off the coast of California on April 10.

“With Artemis, we started back in November, providing all the support all the way to day of launch, all the way until they recover, and then we actually forecast to bring the capsule all the way back across the country from the West Coast,” Oltmer said. “It's probably one of the coolest jobs an Air Force meteorologist can have here.”

A recent article in Studies in Intelligence, the CIA-backed academic journal, argues that as AI degrades the reliability of digital communications like text messages and video calls, traditional human intelligence tradecraft — like dead drops, brush passes and in-person meetings — could regain renewed importance.

The same technologies that improve intelligence gathering may make it harder to trust the data those tools produce or transmit, argues the author, Thomas Mulligan, a RAND Corporation researcher who served in the CIA from 2008 to 2014.

AI is already being used to generate convincing deepfakes and fabricate messages. Mulligan argues that these introduce a new source of “noise” into digital communications, which makes it harder to distinguish between authentic and synthetic signals.

That has implications for how spies communicate with their sources.

“If my friend tells me, face-to-face, that he is in trouble and needs money, I can be confident that that’s true,” Mulligan writes. But when the same message is delivered through an electronic medium, it becomes “more likely a scam than a bona fide plea for help.”

That dynamic elevates the value of communication methods that are not mediated through electronic means. 

A properly executed dead drop, for instance, allows an intelligence officer to securely receive information while also verifying that it came from a specific human source, rather than an AI-generated deception, he says. A dead drop involves a secret location used to exchange information or physical items between people without requiring them to meet face-to-face.

The same logic applies to brief, in-person exchanges like brush passes, in which spies and sources pass materials to one another during a quick, seemingly routine encounter in public.

The argument runs counter to assumptions that advances in AI will diminish the role of human intelligence, or HUMINT, in favor of more technical collection methods.

Long before the advent of spy satellites and tailored computer hacking kits, human intelligence dominated espionage as the world’s oldest form of spying. From royal couriers and informants in the Persian Empire carrying sensitive information across imperial networks to the Culper Spy Ring’s use of invisible ink and dead drops during the American Revolutionary War, intelligence once solely moved through people.

In recent months, the Trump administration has made it a point to highlight contributions that CIA operatives have made toward its national security achievements, including efforts targeting the government of ousted Venezuela leader Nicolás Maduro. The agency has also taken a more public-facing posture, releasing recruitment videos aimed at sourcing in China. And in the months leading up to the Iran war, agency spies had been reportedly tracking the movements of now deceased Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

At any given time, the CIA, the nation’s primary human intelligence agency, may be operating across dozens of countries worldwide to collect foreign intelligence or conduct covert action — activities intended to influence political, economic or security conditions abroad, while concealing the U.S. government’s role.

Mulligan’s paper also comes as the tech industry has pushed for AI adoption across government agencies, including offices focused on national security and intelligence. In February, the CIA announced a major overhaul of its technology procurement process, as part of an effort to more quickly adopt leading-edge capabilities for use in its missions.

In a phone interview, Mulligan said AI may play a more permanent role in helping human spies craft better-sounding communications, just as cyber experts have argued that AI tools greatly enhance and scale bad actors’ phishing campaigns.

“A core part of being a case officer and human intelligence operations is persuasion, talking to a prospective agent or a recruited agent and trying to convince him or her to do things that can be difficult, can be dangerous and can be stressful,” he said. “I think AI has a constructive role to play, from the point of view of a case officer, in enhancing his or her ability to persuade.”

But there’s a prevailing question about how much intelligence practitioners risk when they outsource tasks to AI. Gathering intelligence from other people “is a human business at the end of the day, and it does involve an agent and a case officer as a team engaging in a difficult and sometimes dangerous relationship,” Mulligan said. 

“My view,” he said, “is that [HUMINT] will have to have a human element — a real, essential human element — for the foreseeable future.”