Artemis II Moon Mission: Solid Rocket Booster Stacking | Kennedy Space Center

Artemis II Moon Mission: Solid Rocket Booster Stacking | Kennedy Space Center

Engineers and technicians with NASA's Exploration Ground Systems Program transfer the right forward center segment to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The booster segment is shown attached to a lifting beam on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025 ahead of integration onto the Mobile Launcher 1.

In January 2025, NASA's Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) team made significant progress stacking NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) solid rocket boosters (SRBs) for the Artemis II Moon Mission inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Comprising 10 segments total—five segments for each booster—the SLS solid rocket boosters arrived via train to NASA Kennedy in September 2023 from Northrop Grumman’s manufacturing facility in Utah. The booster segments underwent processing in the spaceport’s Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility before being transferred to the NASA’s iconic VAB for stacking operations.

The first components of the Artemis II Moon rocket to be stacked, the solid rocket boosters will help support the remaining rocket segments and the Orion spacecraft during final assembly. At launch, the 177-foot-tall twin solid rocket boosters provide more than 75 percent of the total SLS thrust during liftoff from NASA Kennedy’s Launch Pad 39B.

Artemis II will launch no earlier than April 2026.

For more information about SLS, visit: 

https://www.nasa.gov/sls

Check the NASA Artemis II Mission page for updates:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
Image Date: Jan. 19, 2025

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