A Pittsfield Company Has Been Quietly Helping NASA Get to the Moon for 14 Years

When NASA's Artemis II rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center Wednesday evening, sending four astronauts on the first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years, someone in the Berkshires had a very personal reaction to watching it happen.

Justin McKennon, an engineer at Electro Magnetic Applications, Inc., a company with offices right here at the Berkshire Innovation Center in Pittsfield, posted on Facebook as the rocket cleared the tower: "Full Send - we are good for launch. This is absolutely unreal to watch with my family. Just so validating to see the work you do in real time. We have supported Orion for almost 14 years. This is just incredible to see in real time."

So what exactly does a Pittsfield company have to do with a moon mission?

EMA specializes in protecting spacecraft from electromagnetic hazards, the kind that can fry sensitive electronics or cause catastrophic failures in the harsh environment of deep space. Their engineers ran simulations on the Orion capsule to determine how the spacecraft would handle the dangerous buildup of electrical charge it encounters traveling beyond Earth's magnetic field. Get that math wrong and the mission fails.

It is the kind of work you never hear about until a rocket actually launches.
Artemis II is not a moon landing. The four-person crew will fly around the moon and return to Earth in roughly ten days. But it is the crucial test flight that paves the way for an actual lunar landing, currently targeted for 2028.

There are roughly 10,000 people who work on a mission like this. Most of them watch from their living rooms, just like the rest of us. Wednesday night, at least one of them was watching from the Berkshires.

Fourteen years of work. One very good Facebook post.