A Canoga Park company’s rocket engines will provide the powerful thrust that sends the astronauts of Artemis II on an around-the-moon journey that will take them thousands of miles deeper into space than even their Apollo-era colleagues.
The engines that will fire up in a spine-tingling roar Wednesday, when the Orion spacecraft is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, were built by L3Harris Technologies in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley.
“It’s the business end, where all the power comes on… and light the engines to launch the rocket to the moon,” said engineer Mark Aldaba.
The company’s RS-25 core stage engines will start when the launch countdown reaches T-6.36 seconds, followed by booster ignition and liftoff in the first crewed launch toward the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
The engines are redesigned from the legacy Space Shuttle main engines. The shuttle program retired in 2011, but the redesigned engines are now part of a program that aims to send humans back to the moon and, eventually, Mars.
“We start building the engines from the raw material, bring it over, machine it, weld it,,” Aldaba said, speaking at the company’s location in Canoga Park. “We go through all different processes to get to what you see behind me.”
The RS-25s power the rocket on its more than 8-minute climb to space with more than 2 million pounds of thrust.
The astronauts, including Pomona’s Victor Glover, will fly more than 200,000 miles from home on the 10-day mission. The spacecraft will complete a figure-eight around the moon.
The engines underwent several upgrades during the shuttle era. The company is developing a new generation RS-25 for when the 16 shuttle engines are used.
“Extremely, extremely proud to be able to work on a program such as Artemis, and we want you, the community of Los Angeles to know that these opportunities aren’t just for rocket scientists,” said Aldaba. “We’re looking for mechanics and trades people in the community to come and apply for jobs here. People like you at home could be building rockets like this.”
The upcoming Artemis III mission will aim to have Orion dock in space with a landing craft that will then take astronauts to the moon’s surface. The target date for the that mission is 2028.
NASA previously tested the technology with an uncrewed mission around the moon, Artemis I, in 2022.
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