Covering All Things Florida
Washington, D.C. – On February 26, 2025, the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, chaired by Representative Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.), will hold a pivotal hearing to assess NASA’s Artemis program.
Despite recent assurances from NASA that Artemis II will be safe to fly, at least one former astronaut still has his doubts.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur, philanthropist, and private astronaut, has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as the next Administrator of NASA. Isaacman, best known to the general public as the commander of both the groundbreaking Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn space missions and the first private citizen to conduct a spacewalk, is also the CEO of the payment processing giant Shift4, a rapidly growing company that Isaacman started when he was sixteen years old.
Some weeks, they say, are better than others. In terms of Spaceflight in the US, this week was one of those better ones, as there has been major activities and milestones set this week:
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), a centerpiece of the Artemis program, may face cancellation as rising costs and delays spark calls for reevaluation. SpaceX’s Starship, a fully reusable spacecraft under development, is emerging as a strong candidate to replace SLS for the program’s lunar missions, potentially marking a significant shift in NASA’s approach to deep space exploration.
Houston-based Axiom Space unveiled the flight design of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit for the first time today at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan. This new suit is a critical part of the Artemis program — it is what the Artemis astronauts will don to walk on the lunar surface.
Prada, the Italian fashion house, partnered with Axiom to design and construct the AxEMU suit.
NASA’s spacecraft factory inside Kennedy Space Center’s Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building is set to become a very busy place in the coming months, as several pieces integral to the Artemis program, including parts for the SLS rocket, have arrived by boat and barge at the Florida facility. The new hardware will be assembled with other existing Artemis pieces already on site at KSC there and in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in the coming months.
NASA’s Artemis II mission is progressing steadily with the recent arrival of the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage to the Kennedy Space Center. This event marks the beginning of months of assembly and testing of SLS before its roll out to LC-39B sometime next year.
After berthing in the Turn Basin by the Press Center yesterday, the Core Stage of Artemis II was offloaded today and moved into the VAB. The process began around 9 a.m. EDT and took nearly three hours until the 212-foot rocket traveled the relatively short distance—perhaps 1/2 kilometer—to the VAB.
Business is picking up for the Artemis teams at Kennedy Space Center — the core stage for Artemis 2 has arrived in Port Canaveral, after it traveled from its manufacturing site in Mississippi.
Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company, announced last week that it has completed modernizing the four flight-proven RS-25 engines that will help power NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on the Artemis IV mission. Artemis IV will be the first flight of the enhanced Block 1B configuration of the super-heavy-lift rocket and the last to use engines remaining in inventory from the space shuttle program.
Though they are often taken for granted, spacesuits are a vital part of US space efforts, both now with the International Space Station, and also later, when astronauts from Project Artemis undertake their EVA duties on the lunar surface. Without spacesuits, many of the necessary maintenance and upgrade duties on ISS cannot be performed, and obviously, without spacesuits, no one will be walking on the moon.
