NASA's core stage of Artemis II moon rocket arrives at Kennedy Space Center for 2025 launch
Just before 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, two tugboats with churning engines began laboriously pivoting NASA's 310-foot-long Pegasus barge and its mammoth cargo — the rocket core for next year's Artemis II crewed moon mission — into position for docking in the Turning Basin near the Vehicle Assembly Building.
The huge 212-foot-long Space Launch System rocket segment — the biggest NASA has ever produced — set sail July 16 from NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. After a 900-mile weeklong voyage, Pegasus arrived at Port Canaveral on Monday night.
After unloading, the 27½-foot-diameter rocket segment is bound for NASA's Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility and nearby VAB for months of integration and preparation. Both lie within easy eyeshot of Pegasus' dock and pad 39B, where the Artemis II mission is tentatively scheduled for launch no earlier than September 2025.
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Upon liftoff, the center core's 733,000 gallons of chilled liquid propellant should fire its four RS-25 engines for just more than eight minutes, propelling four astronauts inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft on a 10-day test flight around the moon and back.
Tuesday morning, NASA officials offered media a close-up glimpse of Pegasus' arrival — with the hulking rocket segment still sealed inside — from the KSC Press Site. The gray-and-white, cylinder-shaped barge was designed and built in 1999 to transport huge space shuttle external tanks.
The Artemis II crew: NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist) and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist).
Liftoff had been targeted for November. However, NASA officials postponed the launch for nearly a year to afford engineers time to study an unexpected loss of charred Orion capsule heat-shield material from Artemis I's atmospheric re-entry. The uncrewed Artemis I mission lifted off from pad 39B in November 2022, and the capsule splashed down the following month in the Pacific Ocean after performing two lunar flybys and traveling more than 1.4 million miles.
Boeing is the lead contractor for the core stage, and L3Harris Technologies company Aerojet Rocketdyne is the RS-25 engine lead contractor. Fully assembled, NASA's multi-stage SLS towers roughly 320 feet tall.
Tuesday inside NASA's Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility, media were given a view of unstacked segments of the rocket's side boosters, which will be mounted to the Artemis II core. On this hot July day, the bottoms of those boosters sat in a storage building, while the white upper segments — some bearing NASA's red “worm” logo — were in a separate storage facility off to the side.
These twin side boosters will be mounted to the side of the core stage, and they will provide most of the initial thrust off the launch pad.
Once the rocket reaches a certain altitude, the side boosters are no longer needed and will drop off to reduce weight. Then the center core will continue its burn until the rocket reaches space.
Erik Tormoen, NASA SLS lead engineer, told FLORIDA TODAY that the side boosters are divided into five parts. He said that their solid fuel (called the grain) is molded in a cast from fuel and oxidizer material that is put through a giant mixer, which he compared to a mixer used for baking.
For the latest news from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit floridatoday.com/space.
Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at Rneale@floridatoday.com. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Artemis II moon rocket core stage arrives at NASA's Kennedy Space Center
