Colorado aerospace companies are playing big roles in NASA’s historic Artemis II mission, scheduled to launch Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The four astronauts who will be the first people to go to the moon in more than 50 years will fly in a spacecraft designed and engineered at in Jefferson County. A launch vehicle on course to propel the craft to the farthest distance humans have ever ventured in space was designed and built by in Centennial in partnership with Boeing.
includes the first Black person, woman and non-American to fly on a lunar mission. The astronauts are Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency.
The crew will spend 10 days in the Orion spacecraft on a 685,000-mile trip around the moon. They will fly than the Apollo 13 distance record of 248,655 miles of 1970.
“Everything is looking like its going to be a go. No issues in work on the rocket side. No issues in work on Orion,” said Paul Benfield, Lockheed Martin’s Artemis II mission manager.
The remained favorable Tuesday. Benfield planned to watch the launch outside with the public and then travel to Houston to be with the engineering teams to support people in the flight-control center.
Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Artemis program for about 15 years. The company was the prime contractor for the craft on the Artemis I mission in 2022. The 25-day flight, which had no crew onboard, was the first step in preparation for landing people on the moon again, planned for
Lockheed has the second Orion sitting on the launchpad and three more crafts at the Kennedy Space Center to be assembled. “Different components are being worked on around the country, including in Colorado, to contribute to those,” Benfield said.
This will also be the second Artemis mission for ULA, which supplied the launch system for Artemis I. A system for Artemis III is at a facility Cape Canaveral, Fla., undergoing technical preparations.
The second stage built by ULA is positioned above the core stage, Together, they make up one of the most powerful rockets ever developed, NASA said, producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust during liftoff to loft a vehicle that’s nearly 6 million pounds.
Teams of ULA engineers and specialists are stationed in Denver and Cape Canaveral to support the countdown and flight of the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage-2 on Artemis II, ULA said in a statement Tuesday. The company’s “ascent team” is on duty to provide real-time in-flight analysis and information to NASA’s Flight Operations team located at the Mission Control Center in Houston.
“The ULA team is excited to be involved in America’s return to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program,” the company said.
Benfield said there’s always an energy and excitement associated with working on missions when people travel into space. “It’s definitely taken on a new level of energy here in the weeks leading up to launch. You can feel the excitement, you can feel the historical importance of this mission coming together.”
For Artemis II, Orion includes a full array of crew seats and full displays and controls for the pilot and commander. The accommodations include a toilet and a phone-booth-size bay where individuals members can clean up.
“We’re also going to give the crew a chance to fly the vehicle for a short time,” Benfield said. “We want to collect some data on how accurately the vehicle responds to the crew providing commands from the pilot and commander.”
The craft can fly itself, but Lockheed wants to see how the vehicle responds to commands from the crew to prepare for rendezvousing with lunar landers on future missions.
“It’s a major program, a major milestone for the corporation, for the United States and for the world,” Lockheed spokesman Gary Napier said. “I don’t know that it’s seen a lot of attention by the general public. But once we launch and then go on to the 10-day mission, and especially the splashdown down after that, I think the world’s really going to be aware of what an amazing milestone this is.”
