Colorado will play a pivotal role in the Artemis mission launching Monday

It's a massive project on the scale of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, and Colorado has a front-row seat to NASA's mission back to the Moon and beyond. 

Artemis I has six possible launch windows, with the first set for Monday, August 29th at 6:33 a.m. Mountain time. The mission is scheduled to last roughly 42 days. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the goddess of the wilderness and was seen as one of the most prominent lunar deities. She is the daughter of Zeus and the twin sister of Apollo, the namesake for the lunar missions of the 1960s and 1970s. Orion, the name of the capsule that will carry the crew, was one of Artemis' companions. 

The Artemis rocket is the biggest rocket the United States has ever launched, bigger than the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Every state in the U.S. has a hand in building the Artemis rocket, but Colorado's advanced aerospace infrastructure has played a huge role in prepping SLS and Orion. 

Orion is the ship that will take humans back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars. Hundreds of engineers have spent years designing the capsule at Lockheed's offices around the Denver metro area. It's most comparable to the Command and Service Module of the Apollo mission. NASA has worked with Lockheed Martin for decades on space exploration, and Lockheed has maintained a presence in Colorado for more than 60 years. The engineering and development team at Lockheed Martin is based at their Highlands Ranch office, and have designed Orion's heat shield and built it at their Waterton Canyon location. The capsule has a shape very similar to the Apollo mission module. The heat shield built at Waterton Canyon goes on the bottom of the capsule to protect astronauts during reentry, and looks a lot like a giant frisbee. 

Many electronic and avionic components are also manufactured at the Jefferson County facility.

Lockheed Martin Space, headquartered in Jefferson County's Deer Creek area, will create the Human Landing System and next-generation lunar rover for those missions. There is not a lunar lander involved in Artemis I. The first planned Artemis landing on the moon is tentatively set for the Artemis III mission, sometime in 2025.

SLS, shorthand for Space Launch System, is the rocket that will get Orion - and eventually, Americans - back to space. SLS is most comparable to the Saturn V rocket that took NASA astronauts to space in the 1960s and 1970s, and several companies in Colorado have directly contributed to the rocket in various ways. ULA, headquartered in Centennial, will provide a critical propulsion stage that will propel the Orion capsule out of Earth's orbit and towards the Moon on a three-week test flight.

The Westminster-based space technology company will also play a key role in the Artemis program. Their focus is on Gateway, a multi-national space station slated for permanent lunar orbit. Maxar will provide the power and propulsion element for the station. 

In Boulder, CU is the recipient of more NASA funding than any other public university in the country, according to Dr. Iain Boyd, a professor at CU's College of Engineering and Applied Science.

"For this particular NASA program, there's been a lot of important contributions in Colorado," Boyd said. 

Hundreds of smaller companies around the Front Range have contributed in numerous ways to the mission. Roughly 180 companies in our state have contributed supplies and components to the Artemis program. 

Colorado is the number one state in the United States in terms of concentration of private aerospace employment, and the number two state in the US in terms of aerospace economy. The Colorado Space Coalition and the state Office of Economic Development and International Trade boasts more than 400 companies leading and supporting space and planetary science missions.