Spacecraft ✅

Engineers recently completed building and outfitting the Orion crew module at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The underlying structure of the crew module, known as the pressure vessel, was manufactured at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans and shipped to Kennedy, where teams have integrated thousands of parts into the crew module and conducted tests to certify all of its systems for flight. Engineers have begun operations to join the crew module to the European Service Module, and teams are connecting power and fluid lines to complete hardware attachment. Orion is part of NASA’s backbone for deep space exploration, along with SLS and the lunar Gateway. During Artemis 1, SLS will send the uncrewed spacecraft – consisting of the crew and service modules – thousands of miles past the Moon for the first in a series of increasingly complex missions. Artemis 2 will be the first of these new missions to the Moon with astronauts on board, followed by Artemis...