As the Artemis 1 SLS vehicle prepares to take its place on LC-39B later this year for its first round of pad testing ahead of its debut mission, the Space Launch System (SLS) and Artemis program represent yet another major alteration to the LC-39 area of the Kennedy Space Center, originally designed to meet President Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.
Since Apollo, complex 39 has transformed itself to suit the needs of a changing space program, going on to serve space station operations, the meeting of the Soviet Union and the United States in space, the deployment of numerous international commercial and government satellites, missions with civilian crewmembers, space telescope launches, station assembly and maintenance missions, and a multi-user expansion in the 2010s.