Artemis III's Rocket Takes Shape: The 212-Foot SLS Core Stage Is Stacked Between Its Twin Boosters at Kennedy
While the crew was on the president's schedule in Washington, the rocket was going together in Florida: technicians lifted the Artemis III core stage onto the mobile launcher between its twin solid rocket boosters on Wednesday, NASA said - the next stop is a tanking test at Pad 39B.
NASA's Artemis III SLS (Space Launch System) core stage is integrated alongside the twin solid rocket boosters, the agency said Wednesday, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building's High Bay 3 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Technicians lifted the 212-foot rocket stage from the facility's High Bay 2 using a one-of-a-kind lifting beam designed to place the stage onto the mobile launcher.
Once testing and checkouts are complete, teams will roll the core stage and booster stack out to Launch Pad 39B to conduct a tanking test, NASA said, where liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel will be loaded only into the core stage and launch teams will practice countdown procedures and timelines.
The Artemis III mission will launch NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano in the Orion spacecraft on top of the SLS rocket to test rendezvous and docking capabilities between Orion and commercial spacecraft from Blue Origin and SpaceX, ahead of a future mission to land astronauts on the Moon.
The stacking gives Houston's side of the program a date to work against. Orion - the spacecraft the four will fly - is managed from Johnson Space Center, and the crew itself was revealed in Houston and spent Wednesday on the president's schedule for a White House greeting, as this station reported this morning. The hardware in Florida and the crew in Washington are now moving on the same clock.
