President Trump may step down, but NASA has, of course, stayed with the president’s plan to return American astronauts to the moon. On November 12, a week after the election, Huntville, Ala., The company said it had amended a 85 million NASA contract to build the main parts of the future two lunar rockets.
NASA has extended contracts to Teledin Brown Engineering for two more so-called launch vehicle stage adapters (LVSAs) for the lunar missions of Artemis II and Artemis III. The cone-shaped LVSA Space Launch System (SLS) connects the main body of the rocket to its cryogenic propulsion stage, and Teledin said they are the largest part of the current version of the SLS built in Huntville.
Artemis program developed by NASA, Artemis I will be the un-crude launch of SLS to get the Orion capsule to the moon and test the ability of the new rocket to enter lunar orbit. Artemis II will be the second orbit-orbit mission in 2023, this time with astronauts aboard the Orion capsule. Artemis will take the third “first woman and then the next man”, as NASA lays, for landing on the moon and staying for weeks. That will be the vision of the Trump administration in 2024, which would have been the last year of Trump’s second term.
“(Teledin Brown Engineering) is thrilled to be a part of the memorial Artemis spaceflight lunar mission, providing its second and third LVSA units, further strengthening our dominance in the design and manufacture of spaceflight hardware,” said Teledin Brown, President of Engineering. Nov. 12. “We are proud to continue our decades-long partnership with MSFC, where our teams have worked tirelessly to help our nation move beyond the gravity of the earth.”
How big are the parts of this rocket? They are about 30 feet in diameter by 30 feet in length and have 16 aluminum-lithium alloy panels, Hess said.
President-elect Biden has named his transition team to prepare for the handover of space policy from the Trump administration to his own. That team has not yet spelled out the incoming president’s priorities for space, but some analysts believe Biden will continue the lunar mission but will move his schedule forward in a few years. She will be able to make the first woman to walk on the moon in 2028 instead of 2024.
Huntville is not the only role in rocket hardware lunar missions. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in the city is leading a program to develop an astronaut that will take astronauts to the lunar surface, and Dynetics in Huntville is leading one of the three teams to create an own astronaut.
