ESM-2 in the clean room

The structure for Europe’s second service module for NASA’s Orion spacecraft arrived at the Airbus clean room in Bremen, Germany, on 28 April. Technicians started  working on installing over 12 km of cables, fuel, water and air tanks, computers, engines and everything else that is needed to support astronauts further from Earth than any human being has been before.

The European Service Module is a crucial element of Orion, providing support to the crew module that will house up to four astronauts. The crew will travel over one million kilometres in total.