NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — On Tuesday, July 16, NASA took a major step in its Artemis II mission to the moon and then later to Mars.
Crews at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East are rolling out NASA’s core stage to the Pegasus barge, upon which it will embark on a 900-mile journey from the Michoud Assembly Facility to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The core stage can basically be seen as the backbone of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
“We wanted to get it out here now, the weather looked good, the path looked good, we have more rockets coming through, so we wanted to clear this out,” Amit Kshatriya, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator said.
Boeing built the rocket.
“It is taller than the Statue of Liberty,” Eric Lozano with Boeing said.
It will take three hours to get the SLS rocket to the barge, and then the rest of the day to get in onto the barge. Crews said it is basically the ultimate parking job.
The component will be integrated with other elements of the rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in order to prepare the Artemis II launch for flight around the moon and beyond.
NASA’s SLS rocket is the only rocket capable of carrying a crew and large cargo into deep space in a single launch.
NASA is working to land the first woman, first person of color and first international partner astronaut on the moon under Artemis missions.
Boeing built the 212-foot core stage, while Lockheed Martin built the Orion crew module, which will carry four astronauts to orbit.
WGNO talked to two of the four astronauts headed to the moon on Orion.
Astronaut Reid Wiseman said, “We’ve thought a lot about what we’ll take on the mission and it may be an odd answer, but I finally know I will be taking a blank piece of paper and pencil. I just want to record that and cherish that.”
Jeremy Hansen is NASA’s first International partner astronaut from Canada.
Hansen said, “This is one of the accomplishments all along the way. Don’t focus on the end result. This is part of the journey, we just saw the journey. Extraordinary thing that you just witnessed.”
It will take the core stage about seven days to get to Florida.
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