NASA confirmed Friday that the Artemis 1 assembly will be transported from the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center to Launch Complex 39B on Aug. 18, which means it will need to make the roughly 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) journey.
The transfer is likely to be the last time Artemis 1 will be on the launch pad, with a follow-on launch expected by Aug. 29, followed by an unmanned trip to the moon in space for several weeks. The mission will last 42 days, 3 hours and 20 minutes and is expected to return to Earth on Oct. 10, 2022.
It’s worth noting that the Artemis 1 assembly is actually a Space Launch System (SLS) mega-rocket and Orion spacecraft put together to validate reliability for subsequent human spaceflight missions. If NASA’s program is successfully validated, two additional missions will follow.
The Artemis 1 mission has three primary objectives, each of which is to verify its endurance. The mission team wants the Orion spacecraft to demonstrate that it can safely return to Earth’s atmosphere, that it can continue to operate in a “flight environment” from launch to landing, and that it can keep astronauts safe during the recovery process after returning to Earth.
“Our team has worked long and hard to get to this point,” Rick LaBrode, chief Artemis 1 flight director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said during a live briefing Friday. He added that the mission is “very special. We’re very excited about it.”
“We really haven’t had time to catch our breath all the way through,” said Judd Frieling, Artemis 1 director at JSC.
In short, for the “Back to the Moon” program, NASA developed Project Artemis, a launcher platform called the Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket launch system NASA has built since the 1960s (but still inferior to the Saturn V used for the Apollo missions 53 years ago). (but still inferior to the Saturn V used for the Apollo missions 53 years ago).
The entire SLS launch system is about 30 stories high, weighing about 8.8 million pounds, the maximum load of about 27216 kg, NASA will be used to carry the future will be used for a variety of space exploration missions of the new generation of spacecraft – Orion.
The Artemis project is being carried out in three phases: Artemis 1 (Artemis I), which will be unmanned, Artemis 2, which will be the first manned flight, and Artemis 3, which will eventually carry a man to the moon.
Once the Artemis 1 mission goes as expected, it will this time carry an unmanned Orion capsule on a lunar orbit to study the possible effects of a “return to the Moon” on the human body, followed by Artemis 2, which will send four astronauts to Artemis 2 will then send four astronauts into space, followed by a manned lunar landing sometime no earlier than 2025.
