Airbus is Completing the First Orion Service Module

Airbus Defence and Space is in the home stretch of work to ship the first European Service Module (ESM) to its Florida launch site for integration with the rest of the hardware for NASA’s Orion spacecraft. When fully assembled and tested, Orion will be launched on the Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) test flight to orbit the Moon and return.

ESM-1 is now undergoing subsystem functional testing at its Assembly, Integration, and Testing (AIT) facility in Bremen, Germany, following completion of most hardware that can be installed on-site. Also known as Flight Model-1 (FM-1), the module will be flown to the Kennedy Space Center this summer to begin the sequence of steps to put together the full Orion spacecraft.

As FM-1 nears completion, Flight Model-2 (FM-2) has joined its sister module in the clean room at Bremen to begin its AIT flow. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are also working with prime contractor Airbus on beginning construction of ESM hardware for subsequent modules this summer.

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