There were no tires to kick, but the quartet of astronauts on the Artemis II mission that aims to fly around the moon next year got their first look Tuesday at the spacecraft that will take them there.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen flew into Kennedy Space Center to view the Orion capsule that will take them on the roughly nine-day mission. It’s still on track to fly in late November 2024.
“That’s real. That’s it,” Hansen said Tuesday, pointing over his shoulder to the capsule set up at the end of a massive factory floor holding hardware for Artemis II, III and IV at Kennedy Space Center’s Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building. “It’s starting to feel very, very real. It’s not a dream. It’s a program. It’s real hardware. We’re touching it. We’re talking to the experts. We’re on a path.”
The astronauts won’t get to suit up and climb into it until next year as it still faces several rounds of testing, but Koch said it was satisfying to get eyes on something that isn’t just a simulation.
“When we first stuck our heads in and you look around in there, you realize this can only be one thing — a spaceship. Nothing else looks like that, and that’s exactly what it felt like. That’s what gave me shivers,” she said. “But we were playing ‘Name That Item.’ Honestly, we were looking around, we were trying to marry it up with everything we’ve learned about in our technical classes.”
Glover said that while seeing it was certainly emotional, preparing for the mission remains front-of-mind.
“I think the most overriding piece of the next 18 months for me is it’s clear that we have a lot of work to do and it’s going to require focus,” he said.
When they do climb in for flight, the Orion will be sitting atop the Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful rocket to have ever made it to orbit, a feat accomplished when it first launched on the uncrewed Artemis I flight in November 2022.
Artemis II will fly to the moon and back without landing, which will then pave the way for Artemis III on a mission that aims to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program in 1972.
There’s still a lot of work before Artemis II can fly, though.
The capsule won’t be leaving the building until April, said Debbie Korth, NASA’s deputy program manager for the Orion program. It’s currently set up to endure acoustic testing surrounded by speakers supplied by a local company that normally works at area rock concerts, she said.
“We actually will be bombarding the spacecraft with acoustic noise that simulates the launch of SLS rocket,” she said. “I guess it’s just regular noise. It’s about 140 (decibels). And it is funny. I mean they really did say, ‘We can’t support you this week, we have the Taylor Swift concert. It is a concert company, so we plan around them.”
The capsule, the primary contractor of which is Lockheed Martin, also has to be integrated with a massive European service module that’s also on site on the factory floor. It will keep the astronauts alive during their flight along with actually propelling them on their way to the moon and back.
That integration won’t start until about September, something that takes about three months, after which the combined Orion crew module and service module will go through further testing.
Meanwhile, NASA is awaiting a completed core stage to the massive SLS rocket being completed by prime contractor Boeing at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility. It’s expected to arrive at KSC by November while the two solid rocket boosters built by Northrop Grumman, which with the core stage produce 8.8 million pounds of thrust on liftoff, are ready and waiting to be shipped from a facility in Utah.
Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said all the moving parts are still on track with initial rocket stacking beginning by February to hit that late November 2024 liftoff date.
“That’s critical to stay on that path. It’s this balance of pushing hard but maintaining the right philosophy of not pushing too hard,” he said.
There are some issues found with the Artemis I mission that still need to be signed off on, including making sure the heat shield is safe enough for human passengers.
“We still need to press and get our missions on a cadence where we’re doing the exploration around the moon and on the surface. This is a great first step for us. But we do need to be vigilant and care about the people going on these missions.”
Wiseman, the commander of the mission who stepped down from his role as head of the astronaut office so he could fly in space again, said the heat shield certainly has been on his mind.
“Every time you see me coming, you take a step back because I’m coming about the heat shield,” he told Free during a press conference later Tuesday. “But we really have a lot of really strong trust in this team. We have some really talented researchers and engineers looking at the problem, and I know we will find the right solution.”
Wiseman spoke about his team’s role in history, playing down their individual hallmarks that include Glover, who will be the first Black man to fly to the moon, and Koch, who will be the first woman. Hansen will be the first Canadian.
“If history wants to put our picture on a wall somewhere and they want to paint a painting of (Glover) and hang it in the nation’s capital, awesome. That is not why we are standing here today,” Wiseman said.
The crew’s goal, he said, is to set up future success allowing for Artemis III and the return to the moon’s surface, for beginning construction of the lunar space station Gateway on Artemis IV and then eventually “seeing people that are following in our footsteps walking on Mars and coming back to planet Earth.”
“Artemis II is the tiniest footnote in the Artemis campaign,” he said. “That is really what we believe, and every day that we go to work, we’re looking at this vehicle for the future.”
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