NASA has just taken an important step in the assembly of moon rockets.
The agency is equipped Artemis 2 mission, which will start at moon from 2024, will use a Space Launch System (SLS) central stage of the rocket which is almost ready, a NASA officials update (opens in a new tab) indicated on Tuesday (March 21). The center stage is now fully assembled, except for its four RS-25 engines, which will be in place shortly.
In less than two weeks, April 3NASA will name the three Americans and the only Canadian who will fly around the moon for the first crewed mission to Earth’s closest neighbor since Apollo 17 in 1972. Artemis 2 follows the success Artemis 1which sent an unmanned Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back late last year.
Related: After Artemis 1, it will take 2 years for NASA to send astronauts to the Moon. Why so long?
SLS is not as tall as 363 feet (111 meters) Saturn V rocket which is most famous for six-crew launch Apollo missions on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, as well as other missions that orbited or flew around the moon (among other tasks).
But standing at 322ft (98m), SLS dwarfs the 184ft tall (56m) spaceship that took astronauts into orbit for 30 years, between 1981 and 2011, and the two rockets that took astronauts to the international space station Today: SpaceXIt is Falcon 9 (230 feet or 70 m) and the Russian Soyuz (150 feet or 46 m).
SpaceX didn’t fly Spatialship mega rocket is a bit bigger, about 395 feet (120 m) high, and will be more powerful, with 17 million pounds (7.7 million kilograms) of thrust. But SLS is still quite powerfulgenerating approximately 8.8 million pounds (4 million kg) of liftoff thrust.
SLS is certainly more than powerful enough to send four people around the Moon and launch infrastructure to Earth’s closest neighbor, something NASA is counting on.
the biggest Artemis program aims to eventually establish a crewed outpost near the lunar south pole. The first astronauts should land there around 2025, as part of the Artemis 3 mission.
Support for this work will be provided by NASA bridge space station, this is how Canada got his Artemis 2 seat; the Canadarm3 robotic arm will serve the lunar complex in orbit using in part artificial intelligence.
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or Facebook (opens in a new tab).