Nasa’s next-generation lunar rocket was due to make a highly anticipated, slow-moving journey from an assembly plant to its launch site in Florida on Thursday for a final round of tests in the coming weeks that will determine how fast the spacecraft can fly.
Rolling out the towering space launch system (SLS) rocket with its Orion Crew capsule mounted above marks a key milestone in US plans for renewed lunar research after years of setbacks, and the public’s first glimpse of a spaceflight more than a decade in development.
The process to move the 5.75 million-ton, 32-story SLS Orion spacecraft from its vehicle assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral was scheduled to begin at 5 p.m. local time, weather permitting.
The mega rocket – higher than the Statue of Liberty – is slowly being moved onto launch pad 39B on a giant crawler transporter, a four-mile journey expected to take about 11 hours. The show is being broadcast live on Nasa television and the space agency’s website.
Forecasts on Wednesday call for favorable weather conditions along Florida’s Atlantic coast.
The rollout, which paves the way for NASA’s unmanned Artemis I mission around the moon and back, was delayed last month by a series of technical hurdles that the space agency said it has since resolved as the teams have prepared the rocket for launch.
“We are in very good shape and ready to continue this role on Thursday,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis’ launch director, earlier this week as she briefed reporters on Nasa’s progress.
Once secured on the pad, the SLS-Orion ship should be prepared for a critical pre-flight test called a “wet dress rehearsal,” which begins on April 3 and lasts about two days.
Engineers plan to load the SLS core fuel tanks full of supercooled liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel and perform a simulated start countdown – stop seconds before the rocket’s four R-25 engines ignite – in a top-to-bottom Evaluation of the whole system.
The US Apollo program sent six manned missions to the moon from 1969 to 1972, the only manned spaceflight that still reached the lunar surface. Artemis, named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, tries to land, among other things, the first woman and the first colored person on the moon.
NASA announced in November that it aims to reach its first human lunar landing of Artemis as early as 2025, ahead of an unspecified date of a crew Artemis flight around the moon and back.
Both of these missions, and others to pursue, will be flown by SLS into space, which transcends the Apollo-era Saturn V as the world’s largest, most powerful launch vehicle, and the first exploration-class rocket built by Nasa for human spaceflight since then. Saturn V.
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