NEW ORLEANS — The main stage of the first rocket to launch astronauts to the moon in more than 50 years has left its manufacturing facilities and is slated for integration and assembly into a vehicle ahead of its launch next year.
NASA’s Artemis 2 Space Launch System (SLS) booster was launched from the space agency’s Michaud Assembly Facility in New Orleans today (July 16), 55 years to the day of NASA’s Apollo 11 launch to the moon. The 212-foot (65-meter) booster with its four RS-25 engines was escorted a mile down the road to be loaded onto NASA’s Pegasus shuttle for shipment to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Florida, ahead of a second mission from the Artemis program.
The Artemis 2 mission will launch four astronauts around the moon in 2025, the first humans to make such a lunar journey since 1970. Its SLS booster began this epic journey by exiting the tall hangar doors of the Michoud Vertical Assembly Center on Tuesday at approximately 7:30 a.m. CDT (1230 GMT). Several hundred onlookers, mostly Michoud workers and their guests, gathered early in the humid New Orleans morning to witness the transfer of their historic rocket stage to the next stop on its journey to lift off a lunar mission.
The ceremony began with “Oh When the Saints” by the Roots of Music Marching Crusaders, a local school marching band, kicking off the morning speaker panel as the booster made its way past a large gate leading to the main parking lot. Almost out of sight, the booster turned onto the main road and rolled forward towards Pegasus.
“For more than six decades, Marshall and Michaud have been part of leading some of this nation’s greatest achievements in space exploration, from the incredible achievements of the Apollo missions, through 135 shuttle missions, to the cornerstone that we are here today to celebrate,” said Joseph Pelfrey, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, as he addressed the crowd during opening remarks.
Speaking to the crowd of mostly employees — engineers whose hands have been at work on this SLS booster for the past few years — he emphasized, “we’re here today to celebrate the hardware, but it’s the people who got us here to achieve the fundamental milestones to help achieve our mission goals.”
As small milestones are reached in preparation for each Artemis mission, the Artemis program as a whole becomes more clearly focused. NASA’s goal with Artemis is to establish a permanent presence on the Moon near the lunar south pole, which contains high concentrations of water ice—an incredibly useful resource in space that can be used to create everything from drinking water to rocket fuel. The idea is that such an outpost would serve as a springboard for refining the technology and requirements to someday replicate something similar to Mars, but that’s still a long way off.
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The first Artemis mission launched on November 16, 2022, carrying an uncrewed Orion spacecraft into orbit around the Moon. It returned back to Earth a few weeks later, on December 11, for dispersal in the ocean. Artemis 2 won’t last that long (about 11 days), nor will it technically enter lunar orbit.
Instead, NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will launch on a free-return trajectory around the moon, circling it once before being gravitationally ejected back to our blue planet. Such a trajectory ensures Orion’s return to Earth while the Artemis 2 crew makes the spacecraft’s first manned flight.
When it launches, Artemis 2 will be the first excursion to carry astronauts into orbital proximity to the Moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972, which is far from the only “first” verified by the upcoming flight. Three of the four Artemis 2 crew members represent the demographic that will fly to the Moon for the first time in history. Glover, who served as the mission’s pilot, would be the first person of color to fly around the moon, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American.
Wiseman and Hansen were also present and wondered as they watched the booster that would take them to space.
“I mean, it’s a great sight,” Wiseman told Space.com. “We talk a lot about Artemis, about going to the moon, and I think sometimes it gets lost that the hardware is here,” he said, continuing, “the Orion spacecraft is at the Kennedy Space Center. Our boosters are at the Kennedy Space Center, we just watched the next stop is the Kennedy Space Center, all the pieces are coming together, and when you look at the rocket, you think of all the people here in Mississippi, in Alabama. , and then in the US, who created this thing, from creating it; that’s what I adore him for,” Wiseman said.
After the success of Artemis 1 in 2022, Artemis 2 was planned for November 2024, but NASA decided to delay the mission after the suboptimal performance of several systems on the Orion spacecraft, including problems with its heat shield during re-entry. because as well as problems found with some of the life support hardware built into Orion for Artemis 2.
“If we want to achieve great things, we must all cooperate, all contributions must be put into the effort. And this [booster] is just one small example of this. And this is a very clear example as we’re throwing four people around the moon on Artemis 2,” Hansen told Space.com after the booster rolled out of sight.
Since Artemis 2 was scheduled for no earlier than September 2025, NASA also delayed the next mission by one more year, aiming to launch Artemis 3 no earlier than September 2026. However, this mission has its proprietary hardware dependencies that may slow it down further.
Artemis 3 is the first of the program designed to land astronauts on the lunar surface, but to do so, key pieces of mission hardware will also need to be completed – namely SpaceX’s Starship, which NASA has contracted to use as the lander on the moon mission.
Starship test flights have already begun, with its fifth expected before the end of the summer, but for a spacecraft that hasn’t even been in orbit yet, 2026 is an aggressive schedule. The newly designed extracorporeal spacesuits that Artemis 3 astronauts will wear while crossing the lunar surface are being built by Houston-based Axiom Space and are also still awaiting completion.
As for the Artemis 2 booster, after its 1-mile journey Tuesday morning, the rocket will remain aboard NASA’s Pegasus shuttle as it leaves the marshy waters of New Orleans for a 900-mile journey across the Gulf of Mexico to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Town Canaveral, Florida. Pegasus is scheduled to arrive at this spaceport on July 23, where the stage will then be transferred from the barge and into the vehicle assembly building across the street.
Once inside, the booster will undergo a series of system and hardware checks before being outfitted with the rest of the rocket’s components and stages, including its two solid-propellant rocket boosters, the cryogenic intermediate stage used to propel Orion to an orbital velocity of about Earth and for the Orion Proximity Operations Demonstration, the Orion spacecraft itself and its service module.
