Rocket pieces for the primary human moon mission in 50 years glided into their launch center via rail.
NASA‘s massive rocket booster segments, too large to ship by other means, safely arrived at a Florida railyard for a “turning point” in launching Artemis 2 and 4 astronauts around the moon late next 12 months, agency officials stated on Sept. 25. The boosters will support the agency’s powerful Space Launch System rocket in the course of the moon mission’s launch in 2024.
The SLS, probably the most powerful rocket ever built, will nevertheless require help from twin solid rocket boosters built by Northrop Grumman to launch the Artemis 2 crew into space. Each of those fully assembled and fueled boosters weighs 1.6 million kilos (720,000 kg), which NASA officials have said is the equivalent mass of 4 blue whales.
“Right heading in the right direction!” NASA officials enthused in a post on X (formerly Twitter) announcing the secure arrival of the boosters, which took several days to cross eight states between Utah and Florida. (Trainspotters reported sightings en route starting Sept. 21, suggesting the trip took 4 days or so.)
Related: Watch fiery separation of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket boosters
The roughly 300,000-pound (136,000-kg) pieces arrived from Promontory, Utah (north of Salt Lake City) at a rail yard in Titusville, not removed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. They were hauled by locomotive Florida East Coast Railway (FEC) 426 on Train 421, amateur trainspotters said on RailPictures.net and on platforms equivalent to YouTube.
Each of the ten pieces is so tall that it’s not possible to get them under standard freeway bridges, said Mark Ferguson, forward assembly subsystems manager for boosters, in a KSC interview streamed on Facebook on Wednesday (Oct. 4.)
The 2-story segments range in height from 26 to 33 feet or roughly 8 to 10 meters, depending on where they’re used on the rocket. An ordinary interstate highway clearance is just 16 feet or 5 meters, the Department of Transportation states.
“We just couldn’t handle it over the road. The train does it, though,” Ferguson said. “We are able to bring them across eight states. We are able to undergo all of the tunnels — the whole lot. We now have a transparent path on that. In order that’s why we use the train.”
FEC owns a 351-mile or 565-km track stretching from Jacksonville (near Georgia, within the north) through to Miami near the state’s southern tip. The rail has several state connections to other lines, in line with FEC’s website. As for the booster shipment, it pulled in at fundamental line interchange Jay Jay in Titusville near KSC’s 38-mile (61-km) industrial short line, trainspotters said.
The boosters then made their option to KSC via NASA’s fleet of mobile automobile movers (made by rail technology company Shuttlewagon). The Shuttlewagons used to tug booster parts from the space shuttle program along the identical KSC tracks.
Actually, these Artemis 2 pieces already made the KSC track journey themselves in the course of the shuttle program. That is because every bit is recycled from the old missions; the Artemis program SLS boosters are also based on the design of the old shuttle boosters (but using five segments, as a substitute of 4, for extra power.)
Related: NASA’s Artemis 1 mission to launch using space shuttle-used parts
Artemis 2’s booster pieces at the moment are being prepared at KSC’s Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility (RPSF). The covers were expected to be removed shortly, booster officials said on Oct. 4, for critical inspections to ensure that the pieces survived the journey.
“The technicians actually crawl into the middle of the propellant — the bore — and do inspections, in search of deficiencies or cracks,” booster flow manager Heather Gillette said in the identical Facebook livestream.
“Once they’re done with that, they go take the 2 facility overhead cranes — 200 ton cranes,” she continued. Using the cranes “on either side of the (booster) segment,” she said, “they rotate it (the segment) from horizontal to vertical, and so they move it over to our buildup stands.”
The 2 buildup stands will function scaffolding for every of the aft assemblies, which steer the dual boosters in flight. The stands will allow technicians to piece together the flame-emitting rocket nozzle, align with the aft segments and aft skirts, Gillette said. (The aft skirts were already at KSC, having been shipped by a small vehicle from the middle’s Booster Fabrication Facility.)
The remaining booster pieces can be stored at RPSF until the aft assemblies are ready. Then the whole lot can be brought from RPSF into KSC’s iconic Vehicle Assembly Constructing for stacking for the massive launch day.