Q&A with Mike Hawes, Lockheed Martin’s Orion program manager

The Biden administration supports continuing NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts back to the moon, the White House said last week, without stating whether it will back away from the program’s already-in-doubt schedule for a lunar landing by the end of 2024.

The rocket, designated FLTA006 by Firefly Aerospace, carried a technology demonstration for Lockheed Martin’s LM400 Technology Demonstration (Tech Demo) satellite bus. The mission, dubbed ‘Message in a Booster,’ lifted off at the beginning of the Tuesday launch window at 6:37 a.m. PDT (9:37 a.m. EDT, 1337 UTC).

Boeing and SpaceX are readying for launch abort tests in the coming weeks to validate the crew escape systems for the new human-rated Starliner and Crew Dragon spaceships, now scheduled to begin ferrying astronauts to the International Space Station in the first half of next year.