The slow race of getting NASA’s Space Launch System rocket pieced together for next year’s Artemis II moon mission jumped a big hurdle over the weekend.

The 212-foot-tall core stage was placed Sunday alongside two solid rocket boosters at Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building — meaning the rocket that provides the oomph for what will be the first crewed mission in the Artemis program is in place.

Together the core stage’s four RS-25 engines, converted from the Space Shuttle Program, and the two boosters provide 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

While SpaceX’s in-development Starship has since surpassed that liftoff thrust, SLS remains the most-powerful rocket to ever send a payload into orbit. That happened in 2022 on the Artemis I mission when an uncrewed Orion spacecraft traveled to the moon.

For now, NASA is sticking with the pricey SLS as the rocket for its next two Artemis missions, although the future of the program’s moon- and Mars-bound aspirations is something that could shift under the second Trump administration.

Artemis II’s goal is to send an Orion capsule back around the moon — but this time with four astronauts on board for a 10-day mission. Its crew is NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

That mission won’t land, but the next one — Artemis III, targeting no earlier than summer 2027 for launch — aims to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.

While the Artemis II mission is on the calendar for no later than April 2026, NASA teams are pushing to fly as early as February.

To get there, though, more pieces have to be stacked atop the core stage, including the launch vehicle stage adapter, interim cryogenic propulsion stage, Orion stage adapter, and then finally, the Orion spacecraft.

NASA officials stated earlier this month that Orion will be shipped over to the VAB for stacking in late April or early May — with NASA’s goal to roll the completely stacked rocket to the launch pad by year-end.

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