NASA’s most powerful rocket is due to send four astronauts on a mission to orbit the moon earlier this week, and although the launch team must ensure that everything goes well in Florida, the success of the mission will also depend on the hardware developed in the Seattle area.
During a visit to two contractors for NASA’s Artemis moon mission on Monday, US Secretary of State Maria Cantwell said that when it comes to spaceflight, it’s important to get the little things right.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, well, we can build big rockets,’ right?” the Washington state Democrat said at the Karman Space & Defense manufacturing facility in Mukilteo, Wash. “But do we know how to separate the payloads and bring them back, and do all that? That’s what we’re doing here in Puget Sound. … I think that’s the big story that people don’t understand.”
NASA’s biggest story will focus on the first humans from Earth to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The Artemis 2 crew will not land on the lunar surface during what is expected to be a 10-day mission. But because their orbit 8 takes them 4,700 miles beyond the moon, they will set a new record for human travel beyond Earth.
The first liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is scheduled for 6:24 pm ET (3:24 pm PT) on Wednesday, with a backup date available through April 6. NASA plans to provide a live video countdown and launch via YouTube, beginning at 12:50 pm ET (9:50 am PT) on launch day.
This will be the second launch of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which sent the decommissioned Orion space capsule to the moon for the Artemis 1 probe in 2022. The Artemis 2 crew – including NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Noma Hansen will be the first humans in space.
If all goes according to plan, Artemis 2 will pave the way for NASA to test lunar rovers built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin spacecraft in 2027, and Artemis 3 will put astronauts on the moon’s surface in 2028. And that’s just the beginning. “Ultimately, Artemis will return to the moon and build a permanent lunar base that can be used to accelerate our journey to Mars,” Cantwell said.
In order for the larger story of Artemis’ plan to unfold, thousands of smaller but less important stories will have to play out successfully. NASA says 2,700 commercial operators in 47 states contribute to the Artemis program. More than a dozen of those providers, from Blue Origin to SuperGraphics, have a presence in Washington state.
One of the best known of those Washington state suppliers is L3Harris, headquartered in California but operating out of a facility in Redmond that has built thrusters for nearly every NASA program. (The facility was operated by Aerojet Rocketdyne until L3Harris acquired that company in 2023. Now L3Harris is in the midst of yet another business transition.)
During a visit to the Redmond facility, Cantwell said L3Harris and other aerospace companies exemplify the “engineering brainstorming” that is one of the strengths of the Pacific Northwest’s technology industry. “That’s why people called us the Silicon Valley of space,” he said.
Redmond’s L3Harris team is making thrusters for Orion’s European-built service module, Orion’s crew module and the upper stage of the Space Launch System. It was also given a leading role in the development of the main engine for the future Orion spacecraft.
John Schneider, vice president of operations for L3Harris, acknowledged that most of the rocket engines built to send astronauts to the moon come from other sources. “But if you want to come back, you need a Redmond thruster to bring you back to Earth safely,” he said.
And you need hardware developed by Karman Space & Defense. Like L3Harris, Karman is based in California but works out of the Seattle area. The Mukilteo team is developing mechanisms that ensure the safe deployment of Orion’s parachutes, as well as mechanisms designed to open a side hatch on the Orion spacecraft if astronauts need to make an emergency exit.
Jonathan Beaudoin, chief operating officer at Karman Space & Defense, says he hopes we won’t have to see the hatch release system in action in a real emergency. “But if we did, it would be a better job,” he added.
Artemis 2 is currently focused on space lighting for the teams that support the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft, but Washington’s space companies are also involved in other aspects of the Artemis program. Blue Origin, for example, is getting its Blue Moon spacecraft ready to go to the moon and is working on a system that can turn lunar debris into solar cells and power lines.
In today’s mission, Cantwell gets a sneak peek at a robotic spaceship that Karman is assembling for a NASA-backed mission to the moon. The senator said he also heard about new things that are not yet ready to be revealed to the public. Those innovations could be on the horizon as NASA pursues its plan to build a permanent lunar base — a plan endorsed in a bipartisan authorization bill that Cantwell and his colleagues on the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved this month.
“This is about advanced technology. These guys aren’t waiting for someone to explain what’s next. They come out here and solve a problem and say to NASA, ‘We have a solution.’ And that’s great,” Cantwell said.
“It’s obvious that some of this they don’t want to show you for reasons of intellectual property protection,” he added. “But we are really proud that our region is still far ahead, thinking about the problems we will face and what the possible solutions are.”
