Late Saturday night, Engineers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida moved the core stage of NASA’s second space launch system rocket into a position between the two solid boosters of the vehicle.
Working within the iconic 52-storey vehicle assembly building, the ground team used a heavy-duty crane to first lift the butterscotch orange core stage from the cradle of the spongy aisle in the VAB, the central passageway between the building’s four rocket assembly bays. The crane then rotated the structure vertically, allowing workers to cut one of the cranes from the bottom of the rocket.
That led to the rocket being hung on a 325-ton overhead crane, which lifted it up to the building’s northeast high bay on the transom. The Boeing core stage weighs approximately 94 tons (85 metric tons) and is approximately 212 feet (65 meters) tall and contains 730,000 gallons of cryogenic propellant upon lift-off. This is the only biggest component of NASA’s Artemis II mission, and will ferry astronaut crews across the moon next year.
Finally, the ground crew has already stacked on a mobile launch platform within the High Bay 3, lowering the rocket between the twin solid rocket boosters on the Space Launch System, with NASA assembled the Space Shuttle and Saturn V Rockets from the Apollo Lunar Missions.
On Sunday, teams within the VAB connected the core stage to each booster at the attachment point, including forward and rear loads. After completing the electrical and data connections, the engineers stack cone-shaped adapters on top of the core stage, followed by the rocket’s upper stage, another adapter ring, and finally the Orion spacecraft, home to four Artemis II crews, for a 10-day deep space.
Caption: Four RS-25 engines left from NASA’s Space Shuttle program power the SLS core stage.
Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux
Through movement
It is the first crew of NASA’s Artemis program, with astronauts landing in the lunar Antarctic and ultimately looking to future expeditions to Mars, building a sustainable human presence on the moon. The first crew of the program is embedded in pencil for the Artemis III mission using SLS and Orion, but will add new pieces. SpaceX’s giant spacecraft rocket is used as a lunar lander for human evaluations. The Artemis II does not land, but it will transport people near the moon for the first time since 1972.
The Artemis II core stage arrived from a factory in Louisiana last year, and NASA began stacking SLS solid rocket boosters in November. Other recent achievements on the road to Artemis II include the installation of Orion Spacecraft solar panels and the close-out of the Kennedy Space Center’s Craft’s service module with aerodynamic panels to attack during launch.
As soon as next month, the Orion spacecraft will move to another facility in Kennedy to supply fuel, then to another building to fill the launch discontinuation system and to the VAB for stacking on top of the space launch system. Prior to the 2022 free Artemis I mission, it took about eight months to complete these activities before delivering Orion to the VAB. Therefore, it is fair to be skeptical of the NASA target release date for Artemis II in April 2026.
