Assembly and testing of NASA’s Artemis III Orion spacecraft are progressing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This spacecraft is slated to carry astronauts on the first crewed lunar landing mission since Apollo 17 in December 1972.
Recent milestones included the initial power-on of the crew module’s core avionics, which include two redundant vehicle-management computers and six power-and-data units. This event marked the transition from assembly to a comprehensive series of subsystem checks. These checks must be successfully completed before the capsule is mated with its European-built service module ahead of the mission, now targeted for no earlier than mid-2027.
The Artemis III Orion, designated for the third mission of the Artemis program, will carry four astronauts from Earth to lunar orbit and then return them to Earth. Once in lunar orbit, Orion will dock with a SpaceX Starship Human Landing System (HLS). After that, two astronauts will then transfer to the HLS to descend to and land on the Moon’s south polar region. The other two astronauts will remain aboard Orion in lunar orbit.
Following the crew module power-on, it is now entering a multi-month testing period inside Kennedy’s Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building. Engineers are conducting burn-in tests on Orion’s two Honeywell flight computers, displays, and hand controllers, then will pressurize the oxidizer and fuel tanks to well above their maximum flight pressure.
The testing program includes thermal-vacuum trials that simulate extreme space conditions, high-intensity acoustic testing, and vibration tests that replicate launch conditions. If all system parameters remain within specifications, the crew module will be moved for integration with ESA’s third European Service Module (ESM-3).
Airbus, under contract to the European Space Agency (ESA), completed pressure tests on the ESM-3 in Bremen, Germany, and delivered it to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 2024. Integration work on the ESM-3 began at Kennedy in late 2024, with power-on of its avionics systems planned for later in 2025.
