One of the primary pieces of the rockets for NASA's Artemis III mission was rolled into the Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday morning, bringing the mission one step closer — if still more than a year away.
The top four-fifths of the 212-foot-long core stage — which contains crucial fuel tanks for launching — arrived in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday after traveling 900 miles by water from New Orleans.
After it arrived at the Kennedy Space Center, crews spent much of the morning on Tuesday rolling it into the Vehicle Assembly Building, a large warehouse where rockets and launch systems are developed.
Artemis III is scheduled to take a crew into low Earth orbit to test lunar landing systems developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, which NASA says is a critical test flight before landing humans on the moon in the Artemis IV mission, slated for 2028.
Under its current leadership, NASA has shifted its priorities with the Artemis program to increase the cadence of launches, with the ultimate goal of conducting at least one launch per year.
Though Artemis III is set to launch in 2027, it may not be until the latter months of the year.
"I've received responses from both vendors — both SpaceX and Blue Origin — to meet our needs for a late 2027 rendezvous docking and test the interoperability out of both landers in advance of a landing attempt in 2028," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on Monday.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have faced repeated delays in developing their lunar landers, to which NASA awarded multibillion-dollar contracts for the Artemis program. Both companies have shifted much of their focus toward the lunar missions in recent months.
"The taxpayers are making a very big investment to both SpaceX and Blue Origin's human landing system capability," Isaacman said Monday. "I would also appreciate that both those companies are investing well in excess of that, as well."
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