Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA 360-degree video puts you directly beneath its SLS ‘megarocket’

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
A 360 Look at the Artemis I Core Stage Lift and Mate

NASA has posted a 360-degree video of its “megarocket” that could be on its way to the moon by the end of this year.

Recommended Videos

The footage was captured inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and shows the 64-meter (212 feet) core stage of its next-generation SLS rocket being positioned between two side boosters in preparation for launch. The core stage will form part of an enormous 98.1-meter (322 feet) two-stage rocket when the launch vehicle is fully built, making it several meters taller than the Statue of Liberty.

The video shows the booster being hoisted directly over the 360 camera, allowing viewers to peer up at the rocket’s engine nozzles that will one day blast out millions of pounds of thrust to push the SLS vehicle — one of the most powerful rockets ever built — toward space.

Artemis Program

The rocket in NASA’s 360-degree video will be part of the crewless Artemis 1 mission that will act as a test run for upcoming manned flights to the moon. Artemis 1 will carry the Orion spacecraft to space for a flyby of the moon before it returns to Earth. The mission is expected to take place between November this year and March 2022.

Following that, Artemis 2, which NASA hopes to launch in 2023, will send astronauts on a flyby of the moon, while Artemis 3, currently set for 2024, will aim to put humans on the lunar surface for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

In the long term, NASA’s ambitious Artemis Program also aims to build a space station in lunar orbit and even a habitable base on the moon, with future crewed missions to Mars also part of the plan.

The Artemis Program involves major collaborations between NASA and a range of commercial companies — SpaceX among them — to design and build the technology that can help it realize these plans.

NASA recently posted a time-lapse video of the same assembly procedure shown in its 360-degree video. The time-lapse footage shows the delicate maneuver from multiple angles, giving us an even clearer look at the core stage as the SLS rocket gradually comes together at the Kennedy Space Center.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Topics
NASA built the Roman Space Telescope to study dark matter, but it can also help protect Earth from killer asteroids
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope wasn't built to hunt asteroids, but it turns out to be great at it.
Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

NASA is about to launch a telescope built to unlock some of the universe's biggest mysteries, and it turns out that same design could help protect Earth along the way.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, with a primary mission focused on studying dark matter and dark energy - the invisible forces shaping galaxies and cosmic expansion. Researchers now say its unique design also makes it unexpectedly effective at spotting dangerous asteroids headed our way (via MIT Technology Review).

Read more
Space is becoming Bezos and Musk’s next data center site, and we have every reason to worry
The AI boom is coming for the night sky
How Vast's space station will look in orbit.

AI data centers already consume vast amounts of electricity and water on Earth, so Silicon Valley has begun looking somewhere considerably more spacious... literally.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, along with several other companies, have proposed enormous constellations of satellites designed to operate as orbital data centers. However, environmental groups and former space officials are now warning that putting them into orbit at the proposed scale could have severe consequences for Earth's atmosphere and the night sky.

Read more
The first possible exomoon is here, and it makes our Moon look hilariously tiny
Scientists may have found the first exomoon, except this one is the size of Jupiter
This artist’s concept depicts a potential volcanic moon between the exoplanet WASP-49 b, left, and its parent star. New evidence indicating that a massive sodium cloud observed near WASP-49 b is produced by neither the planet nor the star has prompted researchers to ask if its origin could be an exomoon.

We have already discovered more than 6,000 planets outside of our immediate neighborhood. Yet, finding a moon orbiting one of those distant worlds has proved considerably harder. Astronomers may finally have something close to the real deal, but this particular object stretches the word “moon” almost beyond recognition.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, researchers detected strong evidence for a moon-like object in the CD-35 2722 system. Further observations are still necessary to confirm the discovery, but it could become the first confidently detected natural satellite outside our solar system. There is still one tiny complication though. This moon is apparently massive.

Read more