NASA's Artemis 1 megarocket rolls back to launch pad for moon mission

 The Artemis 1 Space Launch System megarocket hit the road again on Thursday (Aug. 16) for the launch pad.

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• Editor's note: NASA announced(opens in new tab) that the Artemis 1 rocket arrived at the pad on Wednesday (Aug. 17) around 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT).

• Original story: NASA's Artemis 1 moon rocket headed back to the launch pad Tuesday night (Aug. 19) to take a step closer to a landmark lunar mission.

• Artemis 1 is an uncrewed test flight of the huge Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and its Orion spacecraft, and it began the rollout to a Kennedy Space Center launch pad at about 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT Wednesday, Aug. 17).

• The Orion, stacked atop the rocket, began moving from the KSC's Vehicle Assembly Building for a journey that will take as long as 11 hours. The crawler carrying the Artemis 1 hardware must make a journey to Launch Pad 39B at roughly 1 to 2 miles an hour (1.6 to 3.2 km/h).

• While the rollout is running, you can watch it live on NASA's website(opens in new tab), NASA TV and the NASA app(opens in new tab). NASA's webcast began at 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT).

• NASA elected to bring the rocket out a full two days earlier than planned. The agency said on its Artemis blog(opens in new tab) that the team finished flight termination system testing, the last major activity required until the rocket was closed out and the final access platforms at the VAB were retracted.

 

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• NASA has not released a detailed schedule of the rollout, which is expected to last between 8 and 11 hours depending on weather conditions, road conditions and other technical matters.

• Blastoff of the uncrewed mission is scheduled for no earlier than Aug. 29, and will bring the Orion spacecraft around the moon on a test of the vehicle's system for future human missions. In between will be several webcasts of the science and other tech on board the mission.

• NASA hopes to send an Artemis 2 mission to orbit the moon, with people on board, as soon as 2024 with a landing mission, Artemis 3, set for 2025.

NASA's moon rocket moved to launch pad for 1st test flight

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA’s new moon rocket arrived at the launch pad Wednesday ahead of its debut flight in less than two weeks.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket emerged from its mammoth hangar late Tuesday night, drawing crowds of Kennedy Space Center workers. It took nearly 10 hours for the rocket to make the four-mile trip to the pad, pulling up at sunrise.

 

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• NASA is aiming for an Aug. 29 liftoff for the lunar test flight. No one will be inside the crew capsule atop the rocket, just three mannequins — test dummies swarming with sensors to measure radiation and vibration.

• The capsule will fly around the moon in a distant orbit for a couple weeks, before heading back for a splashdown in the Pacific. The entire flight should last six weeks.

• The flight is the first moonshot in NASA's Artemis program. The space agency is aiming for a lunar-orbiting flight with astronauts in two years and a lunar landing by a human crew as early as 2025. That's much later than NASA anticipated when it established the program more than a decade ago, as the space shuttle fleet retired. The years of delays have added billions of dollars to the cost.
• NASA's new SLS moon rocket, short for Space Launch System, is 41 feet (12 meters) shorter than the Saturn V rockets used during Apollo a half-century ago. But it's more powerful, using a core stage and twin strap-on boosters, similar to the ones used for the space shuttles.

• “When you look at the rocket, it almost looks retro. It looks like we’re looking back toward the Saturn V," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said this month. "But it’s a totally different, new, highly sophisticated, more sophisticated rocket and spacecraft.”

• Twenty-four astronauts flew to the moon during Apollo, with 12 of them landing on it from 1969 through 1972. The space agency wants a more diverse team and more sustained effort under Artemis, named after Apollo's mythological twin sister.