NEW ORLEANS — The core stage of the first rocket to send astronauts to the moon in more than 50 years has left its manufacturing facility and is headed for vehicle integration and assembly before its launch next year.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis 2 rocket departed the space agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans today (July 16), 55 years after Apollo 11 launched to the moon. The 215-foot (65-meter) rocket, powered by four RS-25 engines, was escorted a mile down the road to be loaded onto NASA’s Pegasus barge for shipment to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida ahead of the second Artemis mission.
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 the epic journey by rolling out of the tall hangar doors of Michoud’s Vertical Assembly Center on Tuesday, around 7:30 a.m. CDT (1230 GMT). A few hundred spectators, mostly Michoud workers and their guests, gathered early in the humid New Orleans morning to watch their historic rocket stage transfer to the next leg of its journey toward liftoff on a lunar mission.
The ceremony began with “Oh When the Saints” by the Roots of Music Marching Crusaders, a local school marching band, which kicked off the morning’s panel of speakers as the booster passed through a large gate leading into the main parking lot. Almost out of sight, the booster turned onto the main road and continued on its way to Pegasus.
“For more than six decades, Marshall and Michoud have contributed to some of this nation’s greatest achievements in space exploration, from the astonishing accomplishments of the Apollo missions to the 135 shuttle missions, to the milestone we are here today to celebrate,” said Joseph Pelfrey, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, as he addressed the crowd during his opening remarks.
Speaking to a crowd that was mostly employees — engineers whose hands have worked on this SLS booster over the past several years — he emphasized, “We’re here today to celebrate the hardware, but it’s the people who got us here to reach the milestones that helped us achieve our mission goals.”
As preparations for each Artemis mission progress, the Artemis program as a whole is gaining momentum. 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 necessities from drinking water to rocket fuel. The idea is that such an outpost would serve as a stepping stone to refine 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, with an uncrewed Orion spacecraft orbiting the moon. It returned to Earth a few weeks later, on December 11, for a splashdown in the ocean. Artemis 2 will not last as long (about 11 days) and will not technically enter lunar orbit.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will perform a free return around the Moon, orbiting it once before being propelled by gravity toward our blue planet. Such a trajectory will ensure Orion’s return to Earth, the crew of Artemis 2 making the spacecraft’s first manned flight.
When it launches, Artemis 2 will be the first excursion to carry astronauts into orbital proximity to the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, which is far from the only “first” the upcoming flight will achieve. Three of Artemis 2’s four crew members represent 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 fly around the moon, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American.
Wiseman and Hansen were also there and marveled as they watched the thruster that will take them into space.
“It’s an awesome sight,” Wiseman told Space.com. “We talk a lot about Artemis, about flying to the moon, and I think sometimes we forget that the hardware is there,” he said, before continuing: “The Orion spacecraft is at Kennedy Space Center. Our boosters are at Kennedy Space Center, we just watched the core stage go by. Its next stop is Kennedy Space Center, all the pieces are coming together. And when you actually look at the rocket, and you think about all the people here in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and then across the United States who put this thing together, from imagining it to building it, that’s what makes America. I love it. It’s wonderful,” Wiseman said.
Following the success of Artemis 1 in 2022, Artemis 2 was scheduled for November 2024, but NASA made the decision to delay the mission following suboptimal performance of some of the Orion spacecraft’s systems, including issues with its heat shield during reentry, as well as problems discovered with some of the life support hardware built into Orion for Artemis 2.
“If we’re going to accomplish great things, we all have to collaborate, all contributions have to be brought to bear. And this thruster is just a small example of that. And it’s a very visual example, as we launch four humans around the moon on Artemis 2,” Hansen told Space.com after the thruster disappeared from view.
While Artemis 2 is scheduled for September 2025 at the earliest, NASA has also delayed the follow-on mission by a year, with the goal of launching Artemis 3 no earlier than September 2026. However, that mission has its own hardware dependencies that could delay it further.
Artemis 3 is the first in 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 under contract to be used as the mission’s lunar lander.
Starship test flights have already begun, with the fifth scheduled before the end of the summer, but for a spacecraft that has yet to reach orbit, 2026 is a tight timeline. New extravehicular activity spacesuits that Artemis 3 astronauts will wear as they traverse the lunar surface are being built by Houston-based Axiom Space and are also awaiting completion.
As for the Artemis 2 booster, after its 1-mile journey Tuesday morning, the rocket will rest aboard NASA’s Pegasus barge as it leaves the swampy waters of New Orleans for a 900-mile journey across the Gulf of Mexico to 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 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 components and stages of the rocket, including its two solid rocket boosters, the cryogenic intermediate propulsion stage used to bring Orion to orbital speed around Earth and for Orion’s proximity operations demonstration, the Orion spacecraft itself and its service module.