The factory making spacecraft for new Moon missions - BBC
Two hundred years ago the Brothers Grimm shared a story about four animals who decided to leave their exhausted lives behind, become musicians and head to the German city of Bremen.
But today a bronze statue - a rooster standing on a cat, on a dog, on a donkey – is a reminder of both the country's famous storytellers and that Bremen was an aspirational destination.The inaugural ESM used four 7m-long (24ft) wings, each consisting of three solar panels, to help propel an uncrewed Orion capsule on a 25-day return mission into lunar orbit.The rest of the ESMs are on the production line, in various stages of completion, designed to provide propulsion, electrical power and life support for astronauts.ESM-3 will be delivered to Nasa, from the airport on the site's doorstep, in October, where it will be integrated with solar arrays, mated with the Orion crew module and prepared for launch in 2025.Philippe Deloo, ESM programme manager for the European Space Agency (Esa), which has the contract with Nasa to produce the spacecraft, immediately puts me right.