The giant core stage of the Artemis II Moon Rocket trundled out of NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East early Tuesday on its way to a sea-going barge that will take it to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The 212-foot long rocket stage, which will provide the fuel thrust to deliver the Orion spacecraft into orbit, was loaded onto giant platforms and slowly pulled down Venus Street to the loading area on the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal.
A timeless flight
The Artemis II is scheduled to launch late next year and will be the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, in which four astronauts will fly by the moon. The Artemis program, which began in 2017, is aiming to establish a human presence on the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The program also is expected to include the first woman, the first person of color and the first international partner astronaut on a moon mission.
Michoud, which employs about 4,000, is the manufacture and assembly site for the core stage, which is the largest rocket stage that NASA has ever built. It stores 733,000 gallons of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to fuel the four RS-25 engines and is the most powerful rocket ever built, according to NASA. It is the largest component of the 322-foot tall Artemis II rocket.