During Artemis I, Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the moon during an approximately three week mission. Credit: NASA’s new exploration spacecraft, designed to carry astronauts farther than they’ve ever gone before, to destinations in deep space, including an asteroid and.
Through Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface. And, these missions will allow us to explore more of the Moon than ever before, paving the way for long-term presence in lunar orbit. NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans is where, in 2015, technicians with Lockheed Martin began welding the pieces of the spacecraft’s underlying aluminum structure together.
Technicians with Lockheed bond those thermal protection system products onto the heat shield right here in the O&C, and they do the same for the crew module’s forward bay cover. When all of that is done, the crew module is on the move again, to the crew module integration station. There, all of the electrical systems, including wire harnesses and avionics boxes that control the crew module’s guidance navigation, communications, and its power subsystems, are integrated.We power it up, and then we go into a whole series of functional tests to make sure all of the subsystems we’ve integrated up to that point are functioning properly.
Under the Artemis program, NASA plans to not only return to the Moon, but to use that as a stepping stone to go farther than any human has ever gone before: Mars.
It’s a little hard to put into words, and when you think about the fact that we are in the first flow of what will be our nation’s deep space exploration program, it hits you in the heart. And it really speaks to why we all are doing what we’re doing. Now, we’re going to continue with processing, get that thing check out and fueled, get the launch abort motor stuck on top of it.