First Platforms are Retracted Ahead of Artemis I First Rollout to Launch Pad
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. (NASA PR) — The Artemis I Moon rocket is getting closer to rolling out of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the first time.
The first two of 20 platforms surrounding the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft that allow work on the integrated system inside the building were retracted for roll out to Launch Complex 39B. Teams retracted the platforms, which move like hydraulic kitchen drawers, near the launch abort system on the Orion spacecraft in anticipation of the roll.
Teams are continuing to install instrumentation on the SLS’s twin solid rocket boosters inside the VAB. Thousands of sensors and special instruments will monitor the rocket and spacecraft as they roll out for the first time on March 17 and make the four-mile journey to Launch Complex 39B, arriving on March 18. Engineers will capture as much data as possible on the performance of all the systems that are part of the rocket, spacecraft, ground systems used for rollout, and on the pad for propellant loading and other activities. Once all the rocket and spacecraft systems are inspected, the 322-foot-tall rocket will roll to the launch pad for the wet dress rehearsal test, which is scheduled to occur approximately two weeks after it arrives to 39B.
The last steps remaining before rollout include inspecting each piece of the rocket and spacecraft, including physically entering different components of SLS and, step-by-step, making sure SLS and Orion are ready for the trip to the launch pad. As inspections continue, the Kennedy ground systems team is working to remove equipment and scaffolding away from the rocket and will continue retracting the platforms until the entire rocket is revealed.
40 responses to “First Platforms are Retracted Ahead of Artemis I First Rollout to Launch Pad”
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Artemis reminds me of those thrilling days of yesterday with NASA reenacting the old Saturn 5 and Apollo era,
The Saturn/Apollo stack was built for a purpose, the JFK goal. Cost was not an issue and neither was operational cost. SLS is built to keep the shuttle band together. Starship is built to deploy Starlink
it is easy for SLS to succeed at that. Saturn did but cost a pot full of money that we never got our investment back from (except the landings)…see if Starship works. who knows
All in all Saturn was a fairly conservative design…with a lot of margin in it.
the problem is that conservative designs cost a lot of money. Its becoming hard for me to believe that we can mount at this stage a lunar launch for less then 2-3 billion per flight under any real scenario. even if you start by using FH the bills start adding up pretty quickly …
The shuttle band has been retired for 20 years. I remember reading about NASA having to give up 500 million to the USA pension 10 years ago?
A lunar flight is a lot more than 3 billion. This is because this Artemis architecture is using components of Constellation and Constellation used Shuttle components.
So, you can’t launch a mission on a single SLS. Landing on the Moon with Artemis requires multiple launches. 10 billion per landing, easy.
I think Starship isn’t going to work, they’ll decide at some point there’s no money for a real lander. Then Artemis will turn into a series of missions that go to Gateway.
I think that there is an evolution coming …
Don’t count on it.
we will see. this is going to be a hard decade of change.
Yes. But it will be a lot harder for some than for others.
a lot of people are going to die; political “things” are going to change. economies are going to move. and most likely an Empire is going to fall…whose is at issue
of course I have been hopeful before 🙂
Sidemount would have taken us back to the Moon by putting a command/service module/lander up and parked and then an Earth Departure stage on the second launch, or some variation of that (lunar orbit rendezvous was more likely). It broke my heart when they killed it. Musk promising the Moon (actually not) probably had everything to do with that. Unforgivable.
the one thing I supported for a shuttle derived vehicle was the sidemount of large payloads mostly uncrewed. it is ashame we dont have that. with the lift capabilities of that vehicle (including the parabolic part of the ET) It should have been easy and a rather cheap effort to do it particularly if some way was found to reuse the main liquid engines. now not so much
I think what is overlooked is the central idea of the Shuttle, which was a Saturn V class launcher that only expended an upper stage tank and reused everything else. It was the way they tried to do it on the cheap that made it a failure. The pressure-fed boosters would have not had all the SRB disassembly/assembly/rail transport complications and would have been more powerful, thus allowing a larger payload, some of which could have been traded for an escape system. Having the SSMEs in a recoverable module on the bottom and the Orbiter on the top would have, along with the pressure-feds, meant that likely no loss of crew would have been suffered and it would still be flying. An Orbiter with capsule and escape tower- except that brings into question the Orbiter itself. Nothing says an escape tower and capsule cannot be reused. So why the Orbiter and it’s giant wing and cargo bay of dreams? Exactly.
Now we have the shiny, which is just another kind of Shuttle, and in my opinion just as likely to fail for some of the same and different reasons. It is ironic to me that if they had built the Shuttle as I described, it would look almost exactly like the SLS, and would have been flying much more frequently than the shuttle, for the last 40 years.
yes we are fundamentally in agreement. the weak part of the shuttle configuration was the orbiter. no one had any real focus on what it should do…and no one was willing to pay for making what it was tasked to do…work
what we have today is the development of 1/4th or less of a massive launch system that is stunted because it has no real second stage, limited in the thrust arc of hte platform (ie its a good LEO heavy lifter but they want it to do a different profile with no second stage 🙂 ) and it cost a lot to fly
heavy lift boosters cost a lot of money particularly when their thrust arc is bad. the chinese attack this partially by not caring where their “stage” falls
I don’t like the small size of the raptor, and the chopsticks, and super lifter is just too tall to make a third stage practical. If they had made two boosters sidemounted to the shiny, made the shiny uncrewed and stuck a third stage on top of it, I might be more supportive. But…not supportive of Starlink. What a mess.
Ideally, a SHLV launches and two side mounted VTVL boosters either land back at the launch site or on a ship. The VTVL core goes around once and lands back an hour and a half later. The third stage heads for the Moon. The tankage to be used as a wet workshop while the engine separates and does a free return loop around the Moon to reenter like a capsule and parachutes into the sea for recovery. The workshop gets intercepted and then inserted into lunar orbit by some kind of lunar spacecraft. The workshop becomes a crew compartment for something- space station, lunar cycler, or spaceship. And that is how I see us establishing a permanent human presence beyond earth orbit. Could we do it for what the ISS is costing? Possible. While the Moon opens up new possibilities, LEO is a dead end and the ISS needs to end.
Shuttle “C” would have been the easy and inexpensive way to go. However, the problem with the Shuttle “C” is that it would have left open the potential to keep the Orbiter flying, since it was the only element replaced.
Its all retrospective Tom, at least in terms of analysis but I would make three points based on your comment.
First in my opinion the leadership of NASA both at the poltiical appointment level and at MOD/etc in the shuttle era is/was useless. they dont grasp politics, dont have a plan except to latch on to some politican which will support their usless goals. and have no clue where trends are going or the notion of how reality impacts their programs
secondthey constantly exaggerate program support among the American people…
three they constantly exaggerate their or technologies ability to create their “next logical step”
Shuttle C illustrates this when they started working up the space station “by then” it should have been clear to all of them that they really could not fly the shuttle orbiter safely particularly in a “time on orbit” launch cycle. The development of Option C would have given them an enormously powerful on orbit delivery tool that was a tad expensive but could have delivered a lot of mass on orbit for not all that much money either in operations or development cost. This would have doubtless found USAF/NRO users. the failure in the shuttle system was the orbiter. they fixed the problems with the rest of the stack after Challenger…but the orbiter was just to frail to fly safely
It wold have easily put up the station in a larger more versatile config and taken far less money and about a decade/decade plus less. For people eventually they would have either gone to what is today commercial crew or some sort of side mounted capsule with an escape system. what would have been left on the ground was the orbiter…
What it took was people like Truly etc going to people like Quayle or Bush senior or well even the current NASA administrator when he was a Senator and saying “help us down off this pole we have all climbed on”
Now they are stuck with SLS and no real successes to chortle over what three decades…and the walls of economics are closing in
Everyone sees this but the politicians who simply dont care, and the NASA “leadership” including ballast bill who simply cant climb down off todays pole.
SLS is even worse then the orbiter. they dont have enough money to build a really good second stage (which it badly needs) and t he cost are enormous for the lift involved. you cannot launch at one a year and go somewhere
hope you are well
I would say the way to bring costs down is commit to the SLS flying at least half a dozen times a year. Do it in three steps:
1. Open new production lines for the core and SSME’s.
2. Replace the SRB’s with reusable boosters with liquid fuel engines.
3. Mount the SSME’s on an engine return module equipped for reentry, recovery, and reuse.
And as I already commented, you would thus make what the Shuttle should have been into what they will be flying for the next 40 years.
Deorbit the ISS and commit to a Lunar presence. Whether that will be in a lava tube, a modified crater with regolith shielding, a water shielded space station, Lunar Cycler, or eventually all of those and more. Let’s go!
the problem of course is that nearly all of that is political not doable. number 2 alone destroys the SLS political agreements
It is not impossible. Bezos is so fantastically wealthy if he decided it was going to be so he could replace those SRB’s with a pair of New Glenn first stages. He could open up a factory in Utah. And use a BE-3 on the RS-25 module (center mounted) to land it back (the four RS-25’s mass about 30,000 pounds dry weight). I would think Bezos might want to do that just to get one over on Musk. And use an RS-25 on that third stage and reenter that and parachute it into the sea for recovery. And there you go; a SHLV to take us to the Moon for the next 40 years. Like many airplanes it is just a matter of how much money you throw at it to make it better. The CH-47 (Maiden flight Sep 21, 1961) was a real pig till the D model.
Now they praise it. 737:Maiden flight: Apr 09, 1967.
Write Bezos an open letter on space news and space review Robert…he might listen to you.
you are very kind to think that. I’ve met him a few times. when he was starting his airline.
I dont think that any of these guys/gals spend that kind of money unless they expect some back. but its a nice thought the entire world is changing so fast right now
It might be fun if someone was actually able to sell Bezos on trying all of that. Would Blue Origin’s well-demonstrated Gradatim prove even slower than Congress/NASA’s lethargic pace on the extant SLS and Orion? I wouldn’t bet against it. But I rather doubt Bezos would be up for punching any more space-related tar babies than he has already swung at.
Sure, take another decade or more to re-engineer SLS from the ground up. Right.
One would also have to build five more Michouds and multiply the AJR RS-25E factory by six as well. And sextuple the respective workforces, of course. Good luck with that.
Especially as even the prototype Starship works in Boca Chica has already demonstrated the ability to build a half-dozen Starship stacks per year with a large expansion there and another in FL already under construction. Even flown completely expendably, a Starship stack is already two orders of magnitude less expensive than an SLS.
The Moon awaits, alright, but SLS is going to have little or no role in getting us there and making it a permanent human outpost.
Like so many spacex hobby projects, Starship will delay a lunar return for likely a decade. The great one and his space dreams are the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. What little good he had done by demonstrating reusability is far outweighed by the bad. I personally don’t like him very much but that is mostly because of the malicious contrarian nagging of his toxic fanboys. They lie like the rest of us breathe. Six Michouds indeed.
Obsessively repeating your baseless catechisms about Musk and SpaceX will not cause them to become true or make possible the transformation of the sow’s ear that is SLS-Orion into a silk purse. Give it up.
“Obsessively” is all about you…LOL!
I needed that. Thanks:)
What is it about lefties and inappropriate laughter? Hillary, Kamala and now you all do it.
Disgusting.
Sidemount would have been at least as expensive per mission as SLS has turned out to be. It might have been superior to SLS only in terms of being able to fly a bit more frequently.
The “killing” of Sidemount was hardly due to Elon Musk. He was busily at work on F9 and Dragon 1 at the time, neither of which had yet flown. That you accuse him of scuttling Sidemount is simply an index of your irrational and psychotic hatred of the man. Besides, this all took place during the Obama administration. Neither Musk nor anyone else who valued his relationship with NASA was whispering “Moon” to anyone in those days. The word was verboten between 2010 and early 2017.
What would become the SLS Caucus in the Senate had long since ginned up its own post-Shuttle solution – the Ares rockets and Orion. It was still trying to save the Constellation program at the time and were not interested in any alternative that so closely resembled the fatally flawed and already-slated-for-retirement Shuttle – particularly not for carrying crews.
Given that Sidemount was never more than an engineering study, and never an actual program, it’s “killing” was more akin to bug-squashing than big game hunting. But, if you must blame anyone for squashing this particular bug, then that blame rests with the Senate architects of your now-favorite rocket, SLS.
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So it’s your theory that Musk hypnotized Obama during that little stroll into opposing anything Moon-related for the entirety of his remaining administration? I think that would require Musk to be one of those stiff-pinkied aliens from The Invaders. Perhaps you think he is.
As you obsessively spam every comment I made. What a creep!
When progress is so slow, retracting an access platform becomes news…!!
…The first two of 20 platforms surrounding the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft that allow work on the integrated system inside the building were retracted for roll out to Launch Complex 39B…
In other news: Workers have kicked the first two treads on the SLS Crawler-Transporter to ensure their readiness for rollout.
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I guess we can look forward to nine more such press releases then.
With the recent slip of schedule you have to wonder if SLS will fly this year or be delayed further.
And how much waver the booster stacking can take.
And, as with Starliner, what Boeing overlooked…
I suspect they will be willing to waive to the extent required due to the escape tower, which is awesome and pretty much guarantees no loss of crew due to SRB anomaly.
The fact that there won’t be any crew aboard is an even better guarantee of no loss of crew.
Much better. That escape tower is dangerous.