REDMOND, Wash. — Space industry contractors in the Seattle area had their turn in the spotlight this week during a nationwide “victory lap” celebrating last year’s successful Artemis 1 round-the-moon mission.
“Without your engines … we can’t go anywhere,” Carlos Garcia-Galan, an integration manager for NASA’s Orion spacecraft, told employees and VIPs at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Redmond facility today. “We can’t get to the orbit of the moon, we can’t get out of the orbit of the moon, we can’t do any orbital adjustments.”
Aerojet’s Redmond operation provides the auxiliary engines for the Orion moonship’s European-built service module — as well as reaction control system thrusters for the service module and for the upper stage of NASA’s Space Launch System, the rocket that sends Orion into space. Aerojet also refurbishes the Orion Main Engine.
Other components for Orion and SLS are built at other facilities operated by Aerojet Rocketdyne, which officially became an L3Harris Technologies company last month.
Aerojet’s hardware goes to Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for Orion.
Lockheed Martin’s Orion program manager, Tonya Ladwig, said Aerojet leads the list of Washington state subcontractors for the space capsule development effort. General Dynamics OTS’ Bothell facility and Mukilteo-based Systima are also high on the list. Ladwig said celebrations took place at all three businesses this week.
“We’ve been doing these ‘victory lap’ tours all over Europe, all over the United States, thanking our supply chain,” Ladwig told GeekWire. “It’s been fun to connect with the teams and make them realize they really are a part of history.”
The victory-lap celebrations looked back at NASA’s Artemis 1 odyssey — an uncrewed test flight that used the first-ever SLS launch to send an Orion capsule on a looping trip that went around the moon, ranged nearly 40,000 miles beyond the moon’s orbit, and ended back on Earth with a Pacific Ocean splashdown.
NASA’s Orion program manager, Howard Hu, cycled through the greatest hits in a video chronicling the Artemis 1 mission. “I’ve seen this video, I think, over a hundred times, and it always brings back such great memories,” he told the Aerojet audience. “I equate it to when you have a big, important milestone. You get married, you have kids, or there’s something else that happens in your life. You look at pictures or you watch the video again, and just all those emotions come back.”
This week’s events weren’t merely an exercise in nostalgia, however. Visiting VIPs also talked up Artemis 2, which is currently set to send four astronauts around the moon late next year. If all proceeds according to plan, that mission would be followed by a crewed lunar landing that could take place by as soon as 2025, during Artemis 3.
Aerojet Redmond has already delivered all of its Orion hardware for Artemis 2 and 3, and is currently working on the hardware for Artemis 4 and 5, said Erica Raine, a senior program manager at Aerojet who’s overseeing the work in Redmond.
U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene, the Democrat who represents the district including Aerojet Redmond, noted that more than 13,000 workers are employed by more than 100 space companies in Washington state — and that many of those workers are playing roles in NASA’s Artemis moon program. “That’s why I introduced a resolution in Congress that would recognize the Redmond Space District for its historic contributions to American spaceflight,” she said.
Like the other VIPs, DelBene talked up the future as well as the storied past.
“I’ll continue to push for the federal resources that are needed to make sure that we have the resources to build and execute the Artemis project and NASA’s other visions. And I’m excited to watch the first manned Artemis launch next year,” DelBene said at the Aerojet event. “All of you are doing an incredible part of contributing to that, and I know it will carry the vision and hard work of so many here in Washington, folks here at Aerojet Rocketdyne, along with it.”
