Artemis II launches crewed test
NASA’s Artemis II sent astronauts around the Moon on a 10‑day test flight, with Orion and the ICPS stage performing key cryogenic and separation milestones—splashdown is scheduled for April 10. Boeing’s ICPS fueling updates and Northrop‑built solid rocket boosters were highlighted as critical propulsion pieces for the mission. (morningstar.com; x.com/BoeingSpace/status/2039389993550934235)
The four-person crew for the test flight consisted of Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. (nasa.gov) Boeing was the prime contractor for the SLS core stage that powered the ascent, which houses a 537,000‑gallon liquid‑hydrogen tank and a 196,000‑gallon liquid‑oxygen tank. (boeing.com) The core stage’s four RS‑25 engines produce roughly 2.2 million pounds of combined thrust at liftoff, while the flight used a single‑engine ICPS upper stage driven by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 that produces about 24,750 pounds of vacuum thrust. (prnewswire.com) Northrop Grumman supplied the twin five‑segment solid rocket boosters, which provided the majority of liftoff thrust and were credited with generating about 7.2 million pounds of thrust during the first two minutes of ascent. (northropgrumman.com) Teams traced an earlier technical setback to interrupted helium flow in the ICPS that required a rollback to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Feb. 21 for inspection and repair, a schedule change NASA said pushed the launch into April. (nasaspaceflight.com) The ICPS upper stage carried relatively small cryogenic tanks—about 17,000 gallons of LH2 and 5,000 gallons of LOX—and mission operations had the ICPS perform chilldown and at‑least‑one propulsive burn while recovery operations for splashdown were staged off the San Diego coast with Navy and contractor support. (starlust.org)
