NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rolled out of the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building this week and is scheduled to make its maiden flight from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 29. Barring any weather or technical issues, it will become the most powerful rocket ever launched into space with 8.8 million pounds of thrust. Supporting the Artemis I mission to lunar orbit, its primary payload is the Orion space capsule. Orion is an Apollo-style capsule built for a crew of 4 although this mission is uncrewed as it is a shakeout mission for both SLS and Orion. The primary goal is to test all of Orion’s propulsion, navigation, and communications systems, and to bring it back to a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean after several weeks in lunar orbit.

August 20 1977, 45 years ago, Voyager 2 was launched by a Titan-Centaur rocket. A few weeks later, its twin, Voyager 1 was launched. They were to embark on the Grand Tour of the outer planets of our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and gave us our first up close pictures and scientific measurements of these worlds. Taking advantage of an alignment of the planets in their orbits around the sun, something that happens every 175 years, both spacecraft were able to visit all of the gas giants and are still exploring today. Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018. Both spacecraft are nuclear-powered but mission managers say beyond 2025 there will not be enough power to operate any of the science instruments onboard. Traveling at 38,000 MPH away from our solar system, the probes will be out of range of NASA’s Deep Space Network in 2036. About 300 years from now the probes will reach the Oort cloud, a vast part of regional space they will travel through for about 30,000 years.