Prior to the behemoth’s first test flight this month, NASA’s enormous Space Launch System moon rocket, topped with an unmanned astronaut capsule, started an hours-long journey to its launchpad on Tuesday night.
On August 29, the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket will launch on its initial, robotic trip to space. For NASA’s Artemis programme, the United States’ multibillion-dollar endeavour to send people back to the moon’s surface so they may train for future missions to Mars, it will be a key, long-delayed demonstration trip to the moon.
At around 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT) on Tuesday, the Space Launch System, whose development over the past ten years has been spearheaded by Boeing Co, left its assembly building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and began a six-kilometer (four-mile) journey to its launchpad.
It will take around 11 hours for the rollout to move at less than 1mph (1.6kph).
The NASA Orion astronaut capsule, made by Lockheed Martin Corp., is perched atop the rocket. It is intended to split from the rocket in outer space, transport people to the moon, and then come together with another spacecraft to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface.
Without any humans aboard, the Orion capsule will launch atop the Space Launch System for the Artemis 1 mission on August 29. It will orbit the moon and return to Earth 42 days later for an ocean splashdown.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has backup launch dates on September 2 and September 5 in the event that poor launch weather or a minor technical issue causes a delay on August 29.
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