The third European Service Module (ESM-3) of the Orion spacecraft reaches an important milestone, the installation of the main engine that will propel the spacecraft and take astronauts to the Lunar Gateway during the Artemis III mission.
The teams in the clean room at the Airbus site in Bremen can check an important task off their list. The Orbital Maneuver Engine (OMSE), repurposed from a NASA Space Shuttle, was successfully installed and extensively tested in recent weeks.
Installing the engine presents several challenges, one of them being the gimbal, a part of the ship that moves to make sure the Orion is going in the right direction. This critical part was also completed successfully. ESM-3 is now in the final stages of construction and will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in the coming weeks.
However, before final delivery, tests and final work will be carried outsuch as installing the radiator and pressure testing for the propulsion system, to ensure that ESM-3 safely takes astronauts to the Moon and back to Earth.
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