Boeing has provided NASA with the second core stage of the Space Launch Syst em (SLS) to send four Artemis II astronauts to the Moon for the first time in 50 years.
On July 16, 2024, the SLS rocket stage was loaded onto the Pegasus barge and transported to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There, engineers will prepare the rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building, connecting it to the upper-stage solid rocket boosters and NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
“The delivery of the SLS core stage for Artemis II to Kennedy Space Center signals a shift from manufacturing to launch readiness as teams continue to make progress on hardware for all major elements for future SLS rockets,” said John Honeycutt, SLS Program Manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in NASA’s press release, published July 16, 2024.
The second core stage holds the rocket’s payload, upper stage and crew spacecraft. Additionally, it supports the thrust of the four RS-25 engines and the two five-segment solid rocket boosters attached to the engine and intermediate tank sections. The main stage also stores the flight computers and most of the avionics needed to fly the rocket.
According to NASA, the rocket’s main stage will be 212 ft (66.25 m) tall and 27.6 ft (8.4 m) in diameter, making the rocket the largest NASA has ever built. The SLS consists of five core elements and two huge fuel tanks, which collectively store over 733,000 gallons of liquid fuel for the four RS-25 engines.
During liftoff and flight, the stage will operate for just over eight minutes (500 seconds), producing about 2,000,000 lbs (907,184 kg) of thrust that will propel it to low Earth orbit before detaching from the upper stage and the Orion spacecraft.
The SLS rocket is built at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF), which is in New Orleans. It is the only rocket capable of carrying a crew of four and large cargo to the Moon and beyond in a single launch. The SLS is scheduled to launch in 2025.
NASA has announced that four crew members – NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Hammock Koch and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen – will orbit the Moon on Artemis II in September 2026.
NASA’s Artemis I mission was last carried out on November 16, 2022. The rocket carried the Orion spacecraft, which orbited the Moon and returned to Earth in about a month.
