"Just how big is this sucker? The SLS alone (the big orange rocket thingy) is longer than a football field. With its external boosters it can provide nearly nine million pounds of thrust. It needs all this juice because it is going to put nearly 105 tons of mass into low-Earth orbit-and that's the easy part. Artemis II will be the first crewed spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972 to visit the Moon."
"you don't spend much time thinkings about the scale of space travel, I do want to emphasize just how imposing a journey this is. Ninety-nine percent of launches limit themselves to low-Earth orbit, the first couple hundred miles of altitude above the planet. The International Space Station is 250 miles up. Most satellites orbit at about 500 miles. It takes a lot of rocket to put something up there. Now think about how much rocket it takes to get something from there to the Moon."
NASA assembled the Artemis II stack and moved the Space Launch System and Orion four miles to the launchpad on a purpose-built crawler at roughly 1 mph. The complete configuration with launch tower weighs about 14 million pounds. The SLS is longer than a football field and, with external boosters, can produce nearly nine million pounds of thrust to place nearly 105 tons into low-Earth orbit. Artemis II will carry four crew around the Moon without landing; a crewed lunar landing is planned for Artemis III. Reaching the Moon requires far more rocket performance than typical low-Earth-orbit launches.
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