LVSA Completed Stack

Seen here is the launch vehicle stage adapter (LVSA) for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket atop the massive SLS core stage on the mobile launcher in the agency’s Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 24, 2021. Teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems and contractor Jacobs used one of five VAB cranes to lift the adapter almost 250-feet in the air and then slowly lower it on to the core stage earlier this week. The LVSA arrived at Kennedy from the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, in July 2020 and has remained in the VAB for processing. During integration, known as “stacking,” the LVSA is bolted to the forward skirt of the core stage, connecting the core stage and the interim cryogenic propulsion stage in preparation for the first flight of the rocket and the Orion spacecraft during Artemis I. The ICPS’s RL10 engine will fit down inside the LVSA, which protects the engine during launch. The first in a series of increasingly complex missions, Artemis I will test SLS and the Orion spacecraft as an integrated system prior to crewed flights in which NASA will land the first woman and person of color on the Moon.