Science News Roundup: NASA's Artemis moon rocket's main fuel tanks filled for debut launch; Arianespace to ramp up to full Ariane 6 rocket launch rate in 2026 - CEO

Following is a summary of current science news briefs. NASA's Artemis moon rocket's main fuel tanks filled for debut launch Ground teams at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday filled the main fuel tanks of NASA's towering, next-generation moon rocket for its debut launch, a flight to kick off the U.S. space agency's Artemis program 50 years after the last Apollo lunar mission.

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

NASA's Artemis moon rocket's main fuel tanks filled for debut launch

Ground teams at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday filled the main fuel tanks of NASA's towering, next-generation moon rocket for its debut launch, a flight to kick off the U.S. space agency's Artemis program 50 years after the last Apollo lunar mission. The 32-story Space Launch System (SLS) rocket was due to blast off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 1:04 a.m. EST (0604 GMT) on Wednesday to send its Orion capsule on a 25-day test flight around the moon and back without astronauts aboard.

Arianespace to ramp up to full Ariane 6 rocket launch rate in 2026 - CEO

Europe's Arianespace expects to launch its first Ariane 6 rocket by the end of the fourth quarter of 2023, but it will take until 2026 to ramp up to the full rate of nine to 11 per year, the company's chief executive said on Wednesday. Arianespace, a rival to Elon Musk's SpaceX that is majority-owned by a joint venture of and Safran, has secured 29 launches for the delayed Ariane 6 programme, 18 of them for an Amazon.com project to beam broadband internet.