Forward, march 🚶 NASA recently completed assembly of the upper, or forward, part of the core stage for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will send the #Artemis II crew on their lunar mission. Boeing, the lead core stage contractor, completed joining the forward part of the rocket, and then lifted it out of the assembly structure at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Next, teams will connect the liquid hydrogen tank to the forward part and complete assembly of four of the five core stage components. To construct the 66-foot-tall (~20 meters) forward assembly, the team first stacked three major parts of the stage—the forward skirt, the liquid oxygen tank, and the intertank. The forward skirt sits atop the rocket’s core stage, and it and the intertank are outfitted with the rocket’s flight computers and avionics systems that control SLS during launch and ascent. The liquid oxygen tank holds 196,000 gallons of liquid oxygen cooled to minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (a...