BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — This Friday, NASA allowed visitors inside the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building, where the rocket and spacecraft for the Artemis II are coming together.
The side boosters are stacked at the VAB, and the core will be integrated soon.
Elkin Norena with NASA’s SLS Resident Management Office told us, “The excitement’s been building up a lot now, with all the hard work getting in here together and then having the crew see it and kind of realize this is what they’re going to be on top of. So, I think we’re getting to a point that I think we’re building up to. This is happening. We’re going to get there.”
Right now, NASA’s roughly 10-day trip around the moon is scheduled to lift off no earlier than April 2026.
Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA Astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman will be the first crew to fly around the moon in over five decades.
Kirk Shireman, the Vice President of Human Exploration for Lockheed Martin told us, " The vehicle’s extremely complicated and critical, and it has to survive.
That’s to keep people alive. It has to be able to be resilient to face. And so, everything you need to.
To breathe, to eat, to live for, in this case nine days, but really for 21 days has to be in that little, tiny capsule.” NASA hopes to roll its moon rocket to the launch pad before the end of the year.
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