NASA took another major step in its Artemis program, designed to return humans to the Moon in preparation for missions to Mars. On Tuesday, the 210-foot-long (64-meter) Space Launch System (SLS) core stage, housed inside NASA’s massive Pegasus barge, completed its weeklong journey from eastern Louisiana to Florida.
It is part of the second SLS rocket that will support the Artemis 2 mission to the Moon, marking the vehicle’s first crewed flight. On Wednesday, teams from Jacobs, the prime contractor for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) Program at Kennedy Space Center, will unpack the core stage and slowly roll it into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the process beginning at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 UTC).
The Artemis 2 mission will have a four-person crew: three NASA astronauts and one Canadian Space Agency astronaut. They will conduct a mission of approximately eight days around the Moon and return with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California.
The core stage is powered by four RS-25 engines made by Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris company, and provides about 512,000 pounds of thrust or about 25 percent of the total thrust needed at liftoff.
Its fuel tanks hold a total of 733,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen when fully loaded. Boeing is the prime contractor for the core stage, which is being assembled at the Michoud Assembly Plant in Louisiana.
The arrival of the Boeing-built core stage is just one element underway for the mission, which is not scheduled to launch before September 2025. At Launch Complex 39B, where the SLS rocket will lift off, EGS teams are completing test work on the mobile launcher, the launch tower that allows for crew entry, engine sound suppression and support for the rocket’s various systems in the lead-up to launch.
Matthew Ramsey, Artemis 2 mission manager, said they have about a month of work left on the ML before it returns to the VAB. At that point, they will begin assembling the SLS rocket, which will start with the pair of solid rocket boosters that will attach to either side of the core stage.
“We’ll stack the aft skirts with the aft assemblies and then go right, left, right left, all the way up, five segments on each side. And then, we’ll put the core in and start doing integrated testing of that,” Ramsey said. “And then eventually, we’ll install the upper stage, do testing there and then the Orion spacecraft. A lot of testing between now and September of next year.”
Elsewhere at KSC, at a facility called the Rotating, Processing and Surge Facility (RPSF), Jacobs is working with Northrop Grumman to process the solid-fuel boosters. They are manufactured and tested in Utah before being transported by train to KSC.
Doug Hurley, a former NASA astronaut and current senior vice president of business development for Northrop Grumman in its Propulsion Systems department, said they are making great strides toward future Artemis missions in the coming years.
“Everything is ready on Artemis 4 right now. Now, we just wait for NASA to need the booster rocket components for (Artemis) 3, we’ll ship them, and for (Artemis) 4, we’ll ship them. And I think people have already started working on Artemis 5 and building the booster for that,” Hurley said. “We’re certainly very excited and proud to be a part of the program and do our part to contribute.”
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