Three crew-carrying spacecraft are preparing for his or her big moon missions.
The Orion capsules for the Artemis 2, Artemis 3 and Artemis 4 moon missions are coming together at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida under stewardship of contractor Lockheed Martin.
“The longer term of @NASA_Orion is looking pretty good,” Lockheed officials wrote on Twitter Friday (July 14) of the three spacecraft, each of which is predicted to ferry astronauts to the moon starting in late 2024 or so.
Artemis 2 will send Orion the moon in November 2024 with an already-named crew of 4 astronauts, while we’re still awaiting word of who will fly the Artemis 3 and 4 missions for later in the last decade.
Artemis 2 includes NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, together with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Artemis 3 and 4 will each include astronauts from NASA and the European Space Agency.
Artemis 3 is currently scheduled to launch in 2025 or 2026, pending readiness of the SpaceX Starship system that can ferry among the crew to the surface. Artemis 4 would then follow later within the 2020s, if current schedules hold.
Lockheed Martin is under contract to deliver Orion spacecraft for future Artemis moon missions across several delivery orders. Lately, the orders for Artemis 3 through 5 had values of $2.7 billion, while Artemis 6 through 9’s order is price $1.9 billion. Lockheed officials previously stressed that constructing the spacecraft in groups allows them the corporate realize cost savings via production efficiencies.
Not shown in the brand new picture is the Orion spacecraft for Artemis 1, which aced an uncrewed trip to lunar orbit late last yr to arrange for these human missions. Neither is the first-ever Orion produced for space visible; it circled Earth in 2014 on a test flight.
NASA and 26 other nations are signed on to the Artemis Accords, which aim to determine norms for peaceful lunar exploration. Canada and the European Space Agency have each committed to providing hardware for Artemis and the planned Gateway space station that NASA plans for the moon within the 2020s.