NASA’s Giant Moon Rocket Almost Ready for First Launch

On Tuesday night, NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with an uncrewed vehicle for astronauts attached, started to move to its launchpad.

The 98-meter-tall (322 ft.) SLS is scheduled for its first mission to space on August 29. The first mission will be without any humans on-board. The mission is the first step of NASA’s Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar project to bring humans back to the moon as practice for future trips to Mars.

The development of the Space Launch System, which started more than a decade ago, has been led by Boeing Co. On Tuesday, at about 10 p.m. Florida time, the SLS emerged from the assembly building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. 

The rocket will travel 6-kilometers (4-miles) at only 1.6kph (1mph) on an 11-hour journey to the launchpad.

The uncrewed vehicle attached to the top of the rocket is NASA’s Orion spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin Corp. The Orion is designed to detach from the SLS in space, bring humans towards the moon and meet with a separate spacecraft that will take astronauts to the surface of the moon. It can hold up to 6 people.

For the mission on August 29, called Artemis 1, Orion will launch attached to the top of the SLS without any people on-board. It will then detach from the SLS in space, go around the moon and splash down in the ocean on Earth 42 days later.

If there is bad weather or a technical issue before the launch on August 29, NASA has backup dates on September 2 and September 5.