Late Saturday evening, Kennedy Space Center technicians in Florida moved the main scene of the second rocket of the NASA space launch system in a position between the two solid combustion boosters of the vehicle.
Working inside the emblematic building of the assembly of 52-story vehicles, the ground teams used heavy cranes to first lift the stadium of square nucleus kernel-orange from its cranes The cranes then turned the structure vertically, allowing workers to disconnect one of the cranes from the bottom of the rocket.
This left the rocket hung on a crane over 325 tonnes, which will lift it on the transom in the northeast bay of the building. The central stadium built by Boeing weighs approximately 94 tonnes (85 tonnes metric), measures approximately 212 feet (65 meters) in height and will contain 730,000 gallons of cryogenic propeller at takeoff. This is the biggest element of the NASA Artemis II mission, which should transport a crew of astronauts around the other side of the moon next year.
Finally, the ground crews lowered the rocket between the two solid rocket boosters of the space launching system already stacked on a mobile launch platform inside High Bay 3, where NASA has assembled space shuttles and Saturn V rockets for Apollo lunar missions.
On Sunday, the teams inside the VAB connected the central scene to each boost front and rear attachment points. After completing the electrical and data connections, the engineers will stack a cone-shaped adapter above the main scene, followed by the upper floor of the rocket, another adapter ring and finally the Orion space which will house the Artemis II crew to four people for their 10-day trip to the deep space.
Legend: four remaining RS-25 engines of the NASA space shuttle program will feed the Core SLS stage.
Credit: NASA / Frank Michaux
Through movements
It will be the first crew flight of the NASA Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the South Lunar pole and finally build a lasting human presence on the Moon, in an eye towards future expeditions on Mars. The first lunar landing for the crew of the program is in pencil for the Artemis III mission, again using SLS and Orion, but adding a new piece: the huge spacex spacecraft rocket will be used as a lunar evaluated by humans. Artemis II will not land, but he will wear people near the moon for the first time since 1972.
Last year, the main scene of Artemis II arrived from its factory in Louisiana, and NASA began to stack the SLS Solid Rocket Boosters in November. Other recent achievements on the Chemin de l’Artemis II include the installation of Orion Spacecraft solar panels, and close them with the craft module in Kennedy Space Center with aerodynamic panels that will drop during the launch.
As of next month, the Orion spacecraft will go to another installation at Kennedy for supplies, then to another building to respect its launch abandonment system before switching to VAB for stacking at the top of the space launch system. Before the Artemis I mission not carried out in 2022, it took approximately eight months to finish these activities before delivering Orion to the VAB, it is therefore just to be skeptical about the target launch date of NASA for Artemis II in April 2026, which is already late in the calendar.
