NEW ORLEANS – The core stage of the first rocket to launch astronauts to the moon in more than 50 years has left its manufacturing plant and is destined for vehicle integration and assembly ahead of its launch next year.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) booster Artemis 2 lifted off from the space agency’s Michoud Assembly facility in New Orleans today (July 16), 55 years to the day of NASA’s Apollo 11 moon launch . The 212-foot (65-meter) booster, with its four RS-25 engines, was escorted a mile down the road to be loaded onto NASA’s Pegasus shuttle for transport to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida, ahead of the mission the second of the Artemis program.
The Artemis 2 mission will launch four astronauts around the moon in 2025, the first humans to make such a lunar journey since the 1970s. Its SLS booster began that epic journey by exiting the Assembly Center’s tall hangar doors Michoud vertical on Tuesday, around 7:30 a.m. CDT (1230 GMT). Several hundred spectators, mostly Michoud workers and their guests, gathered early in the wet New Orleans morning to watch their historic scene of the rocket being transferred to the next stop on its journey to a lunar mission liftoff.
The ceremonial event began with “Oh When the Saints” by the Roots of Music Marching Crusaders, a local school marching band, kicking off the morning’s panel of speakers as the booster passed through a large gate leading to the main parking lot. Almost out of sight, the booster turned onto the main road and circled forward towards the Pegasus.
“For more than six decades, Marshall and Michoud have been part of leading some of this nation’s greatest achievements in space exploration, from the amazing achievements of the Apollo missions, through 135 shuttle missions, to the present historic that we are here today for it. celebrate,” said Joseph Pelfrey, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, as he addressed the crowd during opening remarks.
Speaking to the crowd of mostly employees — engineers whose hands have been working on this SLS booster for the past several years — he emphasized, “we’re here today to celebrate the device, but it’s the people who brought us here to achieve milestones to help meet our mission goals.”
As small milestones are reached 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 can be used to create needs from drinking water to rocket fuel. The idea is that such an outpost would serve as a springboard to improve the technologies and requirements to one day replicate something similar on Mars, but that’s still 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 to Earth a few weeks later, on December 11, for an ocean splash. 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, from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), will launch into a free-return lunar orbit around the moon, circling it a times, before gravitating back towards our blue. the planet. Such a trajectory ensures Orion’s return to Earth while the Artemis 2 crew performs the spacecraft’s first manned flight.
When it launches, Artemis 2 will be the first excursion to carry astronauts within the orbital vicinity of the moon since the final Apollo mission in 1972, which is far from the only ‘first’ to be checked by the next flight. Three of the four Artemis 2 crew members represent the demographic that will fly to the Moon for the first time in history. Glover, who is serving as the mission’s pilot, will be the first black person to fly around the moon, Koch the first woman and Hansen the first non-American.
Wiseman and Hansen were also present and marveled at the booster that will fly them into space.
“I mean, it’s a great sight,” Wiseman told Space.com. “We talk a lot about Artemis, about flying to the moon, and I think sometimes it gets lost that the hardware is here,” he said, continuing, “the Orion spacecraft is at the Kennedy Space Center. Our boosters are at the Kennedy Space Center. , just we watched the main stage go by, its next stop is the kennedy space center, all the pieces are coming together and when you actually look at the rocket and think about all the people here in mississippi, in louisiana, in alabama, and then in all of us putting this thing together, from dreaming it up to building it is what’s great,” Wiseman said.
Following the success of Artemis 1 in 2022, Artemis 2 was planned for November 2024, but NASA made the decision to delay the mission after suboptimal performance of several systems on the Orion spacecraft, including problems with its heat shield during re-entry, as well as discovered problems with some of the life support equipment built into Orion for Artemis 2.
“If we want to achieve great things, we must all cooperate, all contributions must be made in the effort. And this [booster] is just a small example of this. And it’s a very visual example, as we throw four people around the moon on Artemis 2,” Hansen told Space.com after the booster had moved out of view.
With Artemis 2 scheduled for no earlier than September 2025, NASA also delayed the next mission to a year later, aiming to launch Artemis 3 no earlier than September 2026. However, that mission has its own hardware dependencies that could delay it that further.
Artemis 3 is the first of the program designed to land astronauts on the lunar surface, but to do so, key pieces of mission hardware will also need to be completed — namely SpaceX’s Starship, which NASA has contracted to was used as the mission’s lunar lander. .
Starship test flights have already begun, with a fifth expected before the end of the summer, but for a spacecraft that hasn’t yet been in orbit, 2026 is an aggressive timeline. Newly designed extravehicular activity spacesuits for Artemis 3 astronauts to wear while traversing the lunar surface are being built by Houston-based company Axiom Space, also still awaiting completion.
As for the Artemis 2 booster, after its 1-mile trip Tuesday morning, the rocket will rest aboard NASA’s Pegasus spacecraft as it departs from the New Orleans marshland for a 900-mile trip across the Gulf of Mexico. at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Pegasus is scheduled to arrive at that spaceport on July 23, where the stage will then be transferred from the barge and into the Vehicle Assembly Building, across the street.
Once inside, the booster will undergo a series of system and hardware checks before being fitted with the remaining components and stages of the rocket, including its two solid rocket boosters, the used Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage to bring Orion up to orbital velocity around Earth and for the Orion Proximity Operations Demonstration, the Orion spacecraft itself and its service module.