NEW ORLEANS – The core stage of the first rocket that will carry astronauts to the moon in more than 50 years has left its manufacturing facility and is set for vehicle integration and assembly ahead of its launch next year.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis 2 launched from the space agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans today (July 16), 55 years since NASA’s Apollo 11 moon launch. The 212-foot (65-meter) four-engine RS-25 booster was escorted a mile down the roadway to be loaded onto NASA’s Pegasus shuttle and sent to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida ahead of the Artemis program’s second mission.
The Artemis 2 mission will launch four astronauts around the moon in 2025, the first humans to make such a lunar trip since the 1970s. Its SLS booster began this spectacular journey by exiting the tall hangar doors of Michoud’s Vertical Assembly Center at around 7:30 a.m. CDT (1230 GMT) on Tuesday. Several hundred onlookers, mostly Michoud workers and their guests, gathered in the humid New Orleans early morning to witness their historic rocket transfer to the next stop on the way to launch the lunar mission.
The festivities began with “Oh When the Saints” by the Roots of Music Marching Crusaders, a local school marching band, to kick off the morning panel of speakers as the booster walked past the large gate leading to the main parking lot. The booster, almost out of sight, turned onto the main road and rolled forward towards Pegasus.
“For more than six decades, Marshall and Michoud have helped lead some of this nation’s greatest achievements in space exploration, from the amazing achievements of the Apollo missions to 135 space shuttle missions to the milestone we are at today. to celebrate,” said Joseph Pelfrey, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, as he addressed the crowd during opening remarks.
Speaking to a crowd of mostly employees – engineers whose hands have been at work on this SLS amplifier for the past several years – he emphasized: “We’re here today to celebrate the hardware, but it’s the people who have brought us this far to achieve the milestones that will help us meet our goals our mission.”
As small milestones are achieved in preparation for each Artemis mission, the Artemis program as a whole comes into sharper focus. NASA’s goal with Artemis is to establish a permanent presence on the Moon near the lunar south pole, which contains high concentrations of water ice—an incredibly useful resource in space that could be used to create everything from drinking water to rocket fuel. The idea is for such a base to serve as a springboard to hone the technology and requirements to one day replicate something similar on Mars, but that’s a long way off.
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The first Artemis mission launched on November 16, 2022, carrying an uncrewed Orion spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. It returned back to Earth a few weeks later, on December 11, to splash the ocean. Artemis 2 won’t last that long (about 11 days), nor will it technically enter lunar orbit.
Instead, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will launch on a free-return lunar trajectory around the Moon, orbiting it once before being gravitationally hurled back to our blue. planet. Such a trajectory ensures Orion’s return to Earth as the Artemis 2 crew conducts the spacecraft’s first manned flight.
When it lifts off, Artemis 2 will be the first excursion with astronauts to orbital proximity to the Moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, which is far from the only “first” the upcoming flight will check out. Three of the four Artemis 2 crew members represent the demographics that will fly to the moon for the first time in history. Glover, who serves as the mission’s pilot, will be the first person of color to orbit the moon, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American.
Wiseman and Hansen were also present and marveled as they watched the booster that would take them into space.
“That said, it’s an amazing sight,” Wiseman told Space.com. “We talk a lot about Artemis, about going to the moon, and I think sometimes it gets lost that the hardware is here,” he said, continuing, “the Orion spacecraft is at Kennedy Space Center. Our boosters are at Kennedy Space Center.” , we just watched the main stage roll by. His next stop is the Kennedy Space Center, all the pieces come together and when you actually look at the rocket, and you think of all the people here in Mississippi, in Louisiana, in Alabama. and then across the United States who put this thing together, from dreaming it up to actually building it, which is what America is all about, it’s amazing,” Wiseman said.
Following the success of Artemis 1 in 2022, Artemis 2 was scheduled for November 2024, but NASA decided to delay the mission after suboptimal performance of several systems on the Orion spacecraft, including problems with the heat shield during reentry, as well as problems discovered with some life support hardware built into Orion for Artemis 2.
“If we want to achieve great things, we all have to work together, we have to put in all the contributions. [booster] is just one small example. And it’s a very telling example when we throw four people around the moon on Artemis 2,” Hansen told Space.com after the booster spun out of sight.
With Artemis 2 not scheduled until September 2025, NASA has also delayed another mission until the following year with the goal of launching Artemis 3 in September 2026 at the earliest. Although this mission has its own hardware dependencies that may delay it even further.
Artemis 3 is the first in a program designed to land astronauts on the lunar surface, but that will also require the completion of key pieces of mission hardware — namely, the SpaceX spacecraft contracted by NASA to be used as a lunar lander. .
Test flights on the Starship have already begun, with the fifth expected by the end of the summer, but for a spacecraft that hasn’t even been in orbit yet, 2026 is an aggressive timeline. Newly designed extravehicular activity suits for Artemis 3 astronauts to wear during a lunar surface flyby are being built by Houston-based Axiom Space and are still awaiting completion.
As for the Artemis 2 booster, after its 1-mile trip Tuesday morning, the rocket will rest aboard NASA’s Pegasus shuttle as it sets sail from the swampy waters of New Orleans on its 900-mile journey across the Gulf of Mexico to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Florida. Pegasus is scheduled to arrive at this spaceport on July 23, where the stage will be transferred from the shuttle to the Vehicle Assembly Building across the street.
Once inside, the booster will undergo a series of system and hardware checks before being outfitted with the remaining rocket components and stages, including two solid-fuel rocket boosters, an interim cryogenic propulsion stage used to bring Orion up to orbital speed around Earth, and the Orion Proximity Operations Demonstration, the spacecraft itself the Orion ship and its service module.