Cape Canaveral, Florida – Giant NASA New moon rocket She headed to the launch pad on Saturday in preparation for astronauts’ first trip around the moon in more than half a century.
The round trip can start as early as February.
322 ft (98 m) rocket It began its mph (1.6 km/h) crawl from the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building at dawn. The four-mile (six-kilometer) journey can take until dark.
Thousands of space center workers and their families gathered in the cold of dawn to bear witness The long-awaited event, delayed for years. They gathered together before the Space Launch System rocket exited the building, which was built in the 1960s to accommodate the Saturn V rockets that sent 24 astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program. The cheering crowd was led by new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and all four astronauts assigned to the mission.
Weighing 11 million pounds (5 million kilograms), the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule on top moved aboard a massive transporter used during the Apollo and Shuttle era. Upgraded for the extra heft of the SLS rocket.
The first and only other SLS launch – which sent an empty Orion capsule into lunar orbit – was launched in November 2022.
“It looks a lot different, putting a crew on the rocket and taking the crew around the moon,” NASA’s John Honeycutt said on the eve of the rocket’s launch.
Heat shield damage and other capsule problems during the initial test flight required extensive analysis and testing, delaying the crew’s first launch to the Moon until now. Astronauts will not orbit the Moon or even land on it. This giant leap into the third flight in the Artemis lineup will happen a few years from now.
Commander Reed Wiseman, pilots Victor Glover and Christina Koch — longtime NASA astronauts with spaceflight experience — will be joined on the 10-day mission by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a former fighter pilot awaiting his first rocket flight.
They will be the first people to fly to the Moon since Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt of Apollo 17 completed the lunar landing program in 1972. Twelve astronauts have walked on the Moon, starting with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969.
NASA is waiting to conduct a fueling test for the SLS rocket on the pad in early February before confirming the launch date. Depending on how the demo goes, “that will ultimately determine our path to launch,” launch director Charlie Blackwell Thompson said Friday.
The space agency has just five days to launch in the first half of February before it reaches March.
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