Artemis II: Net Force at Liftoff

On April 1, 2026, NASA's Artemis II rocket carried four astronauts off the pad toward the Moon. It weighed 5.7 million pounds and its engines pushed up with 8.8 million pounds of thrust. That is a real, headline-making net force problem, and this one-page activity walks grade 6 students through it: subtract the opposing forces, find the 3.1-million-pound net force, and explain why an unbalanced force is what makes a rocket accelerate.

What's Included

• 1 student page: a short news story plus four cards (What's the Story? multiple choice, a fill-in reasoning chain with word bank, Cause & Effect matching, and a Why Does It Matter? sentence starter)
• 1 teacher key page with every answer, a sample written response, the TEKS/NGSS alignment box, links to the original NASA and CBS News reports, and a short science-connection summary
• Letter-size PDF, no prep

How It Helps You Teach

• Turns TEKS 6.7B into a story students already care about: a crewed Moon launch they may have watched
• Uses the real numbers, so the subtraction is authentic and the answer (3.1 million pounds, up) is checkable
• The key's article links let you show students the source, which builds trust and supports media literacy

Pair It With

This sheet is part of a four-activity Net Force set: Context Clues, Inferences, Science in the News, and Science Sort (Balanced or Unbalanced?). Check out our library for the other three and the full set.

Standards: TEKS 6.7B; NGSS MS-PS2-2. Part of the Daily Science series by Workybooks.