‘Nearly the size of a football field’: Do you know how tall the NASA Artemis II moon rocket is?

The Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) stands at an impressive 322 feet (98 metres) when fully stacked with the Orion spacecraft. This makes it taller than the Statue of Liberty, which measures just 305 feet from ground to torch.

If you were to lay the Artemis II rocket flat on the ground, it would stretch nearly the entire length of an American football field. A standard field is 360 feet long including end zones, meaning the rocket would cover almost all of the playing area.

The bright orange core stage alone makes up two-thirds of the rocket’s height, standing 212 feet (65 metres) tall. It holds over 2.7 million litres of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellant to power the engines.

Flanking the core stage are two white solid rocket boosters, each standing 177 feet (54 metres) tall. These boosters are taller than the Leaning Tower of Pisa and provide 75 per cent of the total thrust at liftoff.

Fully fuelled on the launchpad, the Artemis II rocket weighs approximately 2.6 million kilograms (5.75 million pounds). This immense weight is roughly equivalent to eight fully loaded Boeing 747 jets sitting on the runway.

This specific version of the rocket is known as the 'Block 1' configuration, designed for the initial Artemis missions. Future versions, like the Block 1B, will be even taller, reaching 365 feet (111 metres) to carry heavier cargo.

The rocket’s massive size is necessary to generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust to escape Earth’s gravity. This raw power is required to push the Orion capsule and its four-person crew 370,000 kilometres away to the Moon.