The slow race, where NASA’s space launch system rockets were put together for next year’s Artemis II Moon Mission, jumped a major hurdle over the weekend.
The 212-foot core stage was placed on Sunday along with two solid rocket boosters in the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building. This means a rocket that provides vitality for what will be the first crew mission in the Artemis program.
Core Stage’s four RS-25 engines are combined and converted from the Space Shuttle program, with two boosters offering 8.8 million pounds of thrust upon lift-off.
While SpaceX’s Starship is outweighing its lift-off thrust, SLS remains the most powerful rocket that sends payloads into orbit. It happened in 2022 at Artemis I Mission.
For now, NASA is sticking to the expensive SLS as a rocket for the next two Artemis missions, but the future of the program’s moon-and-mars-bound aspirations could change under the second Trump administration.
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The goal of the Artemis II is to send back Orion capsules around the moon, but this time it’s home to four astronauts for a 10-day mission. The crew are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Its mission won’t land, but the next mission – targeting targets for launch earlier than the summer of 2027, Artemis III aims to bring humans back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 in 1972.
The Artemis II mission has been registered on the calendar by April 2026, but the NASA team is already urging flights in February.
However, to get there, more pieces will need to be stacked on top of the core stage, such as the launch vehicle stage adapter, the provisional cryogenic propulsion stage, the Orion stage adapter, and finally the Orion spacecraft.
NASA officials said earlier this month that Orion will be shipped to the VAB for stacking in late April or early May.
