On future lunar landing missions, Orion and its crew will rendezvous with SpaceX’s lunar lander variant of Starship or the Lunar Gateway – both of which are in active development.Īlthough it is an artifact going back several generations of space policy, the DRO mission provides a setting to accomplish dozens of flight test objectives and system checkouts on this first solo Orion mission. NASA is now planning on staging its orbiting cislunar infrastructure in a Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO).

This type of orbit was a strong candidate for an asteroid redirect mission, which was proposed during the Obama Administration. From there, Orion will begin a series of powered flyby and insertion burns to place itself into the cislunar DRO. SLS will place Orion on a lunar transfer trajectory that passes within approximately 100 kilometers of the lunar surface. Now re-branded as Artemis 1, the mission will see the Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) program launch Orion on top of the first Space Launch Systems (SLS) vehicle from Kennedy Space Center. Formerly called Exploration Mission-1, this first combined test flight for the three programs in ESD plans to send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a cislunar Distant Retrograde Orbit (DRO) trajectory. The Artemis 1 mission to the Moon has had a long history of planning. On a particular day that has a launch opportunity, the Exploration Ground Systems (EGS), Orion, and SLS programs will have a launch window that will vary from a few minutes to a few hours. In general, NASA will have daily opportunities to launch this first Artemis mission to the Moon in an approximately “two weeks on, two weeks off” pattern. The Orion and Space Launch System (SLS) Programs in the Exploration Systems Development (ESD) division are working together to calculate when the Earth, Moon, and sometimes the Sun are all in the right positions to support the agency’s requirements for this first joint Orion-SLS test flight. When the flight hardware and ground systems are finally ready for the inaugural Artemis 1 launch to the Moon, NASA will also have to synchronize the timing of the flight with unique celestial mechanics.

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