NASA Begins Processing Artemis III Moon Rocket at Kennedy

Buildup of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket for the Artemis III lunar mission has started at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, even as NASA prepares for the launch of the Artemis II mission, the second Artemis mission in NASA’s efforts to l return humans to the Moon and eventually land on Mars.

The Artemis III SLS engine section and boat-tail – which protects the engines during launch – moved from the Space Systems Processing Facility at NASA Kennedy to the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in late July, just a few feet from where the Artemis II SLS is mostly stacked and undergoing integrated testing and checkouts.

In early 2026, NASA will launch Artemis II, the first crewed flight of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, on an approximately 10-day journey around the Moon. This will be followed by the Artemis III lunar landing mission in 2027, the first ever to the lunar South Pole region, which will launch an SLS with a crew of four aboard an Orion spacecraft to rendezvous with the Starship Human Landing System. These missions set the stage for NASA to land the first American on the Martian surface.

Teams lifted the engine section onto a stand and mated the boat-tail to the bottom. They installed a canopy on top of the engine section to allow the segment to be air conditioned, preventing moisture build-up and contamination.

Teams then lifted the completed assembly into High Bay 2 in the VAB where it will complete integration and check-out testing until the arrival of the rest of the Artemis III SLS core stage components to complete stage integration, targeted for Spring 2026.

Called the top four-fifths, the remaining elements of the core stage – the liquid hydrogen tank, liquid oxygen tank, intertank, and forward skirt – are at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans undergoing processing and integration. The four core stage RS-25 engines are scheduled to ship from NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in early 2026 for integration into the engine section.

The engine section is one of the most complex parts of the rocket, containing the four RS-25 engines and related ducts, valves, electronics, and more than 18 miles of cabling that connect to the core stage propellant tanks and rocket.

The move is part of a change to the SLS production process. The Artemis I and Artemis II SLS core stages were manufactured entirely at NASA Michoud and transferred to NASA Kennedy to be integrated with the SLS solid boosters, upper stage, and the Orion crew spacecraft. Beginning with the Artemis III hardware, NASA moved engine section internal outfitting and integration with the top of the core stage to NASA Kennedy to streamline the manufacturing process and enable simultaneous production operations of two core stages.

Quelle: NASA