321 Launch: Space news you may have missed over the past week (April 4)

Emre Kelly, Florida Today
·2 min read
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Meet the Artemis II astronauts

NASA on Monday unveiled the team of four Artemis astronauts who will travel back to the moon after a more than 50-year hiatus in lunar missions.

NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen were announced as the crew that will bridge that historic gap during an event at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Their mission, slated to fly no earlier than late 2024, will not land on the lunar surface but will mark the farthest humans have traveled from Earth since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Meet the four astronauts here.

Crawler gets record recognition

One of NASA's historic crawler-transporters used to move spaceflight hardware around Kennedy Space Center has finally thrown its weight around long enough – literally – to gain recognition in Guinness World Records.

Last week, representatives from the United Kingdom-based publisher presented a certificate to NASA naming Crawler-Transporter-2 the world's "heaviest self-propelled vehicle." Weighing an astonishing 6.65 million pounds, CT-2 was most recently used to transport the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule from the Vehicle Assembly Building to pad 39B ahead of the Artemis I mission in November.

Read the full story here.

Upcoming launches

April 7: SpaceXIntelsat 40e / NASA TEMPO

  • Company / Agency: SpaceX for Intelsat

  • Rocket: SpaceX Falcon 9

  • Location: Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station

  • Launch Window: 12:29 a.m. to 2:30 a.m. EDT

  • Trajectory: TBD

  • Weather: 85% "go"

  • Landing: Drone ship

  • Live coverage: Starts 90 minutes before liftoff at floridatoday.com/space

  • About: The Intelsat 40e satellite for Intelsat, a Luxembourg-based satellite operator, and NASA's Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument (TEMPO) payload will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The first-stage booster will target a landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Should schedules hold, it will be the 18th mission to fly from Florida this year.

As usual, we'll have live coverage of these missions at floridatoday.com/space. For the latest, see our full schedule at floridatoday.com/launchschedule.

Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: 321 Launch: Space news you may have missed over the past week (April 4)