NASA's Orion spacecraft will soon be more than spaceworthy.
The crew members of the space agency's Artemis 2 mission are eager to improve the Orion spacecraft they'll be in next year after they visited it for the first time.
NASA's Artemis 2 mission, the program's crewed test launch, is set for take-off sometime in Nov. 2024 if everything goes as planned.
Measure Twice, Launch Once
NASA astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen had a field day with NASA's Orion spacecraft. According to a report from Space.com, the four astronauts gathered in front of their Orion spacecraft at NASA's Kennedy Space Center and got the chance to explore it from within.
Christina Koch, who acts as Artemis 2's mission specialist, mentioned that all of them agreed that they felt chills run down their bodies when they walked up to their spacecraft the first time. She described the experience as "a new way" to bond with her fellow astronauts and the team, per Ars Technica.
"It was great to look inside," said Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman. He mentioned that the experience he received from his first-time visit to the Orion spacecraft gave him a "good sense of how far along [Artemis 2] is."
While work on Artemis 2's Orion spacecraft has progressed smoothly, there is still more work to do to make it spaceworthy enough to reach the Moon and back. This fact is evidenced by the stack of speakers surrounding the Orion spacecraft at the Neil Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building. These stacks of speakers will blast the Orion crew module with sounds mimicking the acoustic energy from a rocket launch late this week to test its durability.
Fortunately, the four astronauts are eager to help prepare their Orion spacecraft for its 2024 launch and future missions in the future.
Wiseman said that he and his fellow crew members are helping influence the design of the Orion spacecraft to help future astronauts take the spacecraft into bigger, much more complex missions. As such, they have to make the spacecraft operate as simply as possible for them.
Artemis 2 Mission Launch Date
While NASA mentioned that it is planning to launch Artemis 2 sometime in Nov. 2024, it could happen earlier or later than expected depending on the work on Orion's crew module. According to NASA's Jim Free, Orion's crew module is now driving the launch date.
Jim Free is responsible for leading the NASA division that develops hardware for the Artemis lunar program.
As of press time, preparations for the 2024 launch are a few weeks behind the schedule NASA needs to launch Artemis 2 in Nov. 2024. As such, the spacecraft may go around the Moon in 2025 instead of the planned 2024 launch.
Free revealed that Orion's crew module is in the "critical path," and that NASA must get it assembled and tested, then mated to the service module, and turn it over to the ground systems folks here for processing.
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