Huntsville turned out a crowd in its downtown courthouse square Saturday to celebrate the upcoming first launch of NASA’s Space Launch System, NASA’s Alabama-led rocket built to return Americans to the moon. The square has been the traditional spot for space celebrations since Wernher von Braun got a ride on city leaders’ shoulders after the first Apollo moon landing in 1969.
Von Braun led a team at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Today, a woman leads Marshall in developing SLS. So it was Jody Singer who said Saturday that America’s return to the moon is here.
“Words can’t describe it,” Singer said. “Pride, exhilaration, just thinking of all the hard work all of our folks have put into the Artemis program. It’s gone from a dream to it’s here, a reality.”
SLS sits fully assembled at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral awaiting a planned February launch to boost the Orion capsule to a flight around the moon. That’s farther than any human-rated capsule has ever gone.
Orion will return to Earth proving the system for the next launch around the moon with astronauts aboard. Then, Artemis will take the first woman and first person of color to the moon for a lunar landing.
“Huntsville’s touched 100 percent of it,” Singer said Saturday. “When you think of our workforce, the support, Huntsville continues to be a key part of our space program.”
“I feel incredible about us getting started,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, director of NASA’s Huntsville-based program to build the Human Landing System that put astronauts back to the moon’s surface. That program is moving ahead toward “sustained (landing) services,” she said, “and we are doing all we can to get to those sustained services. We just want competition (from contributing contractors) to be strong, and we can’t wait.”
Downtown Huntsville was filled with space families, companies and fans Saturday for Artemis Day, a celebration of the big new rocket developed by NASA in Huntsville and launching in February, 2022
Speaking to the crowd, Singer name-checked key space contractors and partners in Huntsville including the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, Dynetics, ULA, Teledyne Brown, Jacobs, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Aerojet. Each name brought a yell from the crowd.
A bigger yell came when Singer praised all of the contractors who support the Marshall center. She said the Artemis generation will build on the Saturn V Moon rocket also developed in the city. “Huntsville is at the heart of Artemis,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere if you don’t have a rocket to ride.”
The crowd on the square ranged from children to space veterans like Rick Chappell, an alternate astronaut in the space shuttle program who trained for seven years as a backup for a mission ultimately put on hold after the Challenger explosion.
“We kept on training,” Chappell said. “It was a wonderful group, and the experience of training is incredible.”
Chappell is spearheading a program to build a memorial to all the people in Huntsville who have worked on the space program. That’s 22,000 who worked for Marshall alone, he said.
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Huntsville celebrates NASA’s upcoming Artemis launch in the traditional spot: courthouse square - AL.com
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