Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
NASA’s new moon rocket arrived on the launch pad Wednesday ahead of its debut flight in less than two weeks. The 322-foot-long (98-meter) rocket emerged from its mammoth hangar late Tuesday, drawing crowds of Kennedy Space Center workers. It took nearly 10 hours for the rocket to make the four-mile journey to the pad, stopping at sunrise.
NASA aims to lift off on August 29 for a lunar test flight. There will be no one in the crew cabin atop the rocket, just three dummies – test dummies teeming with sensors to measure radiation and vibrations.
The capsule will fly around the moon in a distant orbit for several weeks before heading back to the Pacific. The entire flight should last six weeks.
See more images of the #Artemis I @NASA_SLS rocket and @NASA_Orion spacecraft as they arrived at Launch Pad 39B this morning. https://t.co/cTEfEpR4DT pic.twitter.com/MQUci1Tv6Q
— NASA HQ PHOTO (@nasahqphoto) August 17, 2022
The flight is the first image of the moon in NASA’s Artemis program. The space agency is aiming to fly astronauts into lunar orbit in two years and land a human crew on the moon as early as 2025. That’s much later than NASA envisioned when it launched the program more than a decade ago, as the space shuttle fleet retires. Years of delays have increased costs by billions of dollars.
NASA’s new moon rocket SLS, short for Space Launch System, is 41 feet (12 meters) shorter than the Saturn V rockets used during Apollo half a century ago. But it is more powerful, using a core stage and two attachment boosters, similar to those used in the space shuttles.
“When you look at the rocket, it almost looks retro. It looks like we’re looking back at Saturn V,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said this month. “But it’s a completely different, new, highly sophisticated, more sophisticated rocket and spacecraft.
During Apollo, 24 astronauts flew to the moon, 12 of whom landed on the moon between 1969 and 1972. The space agency wants a more diverse team and a more sustained effort under Artemis, named after Apollo’s mythological twin.
When #Artemis I launches to the Moon and back, there will be plenty of science hitching a ride. From CubeSats designed to hunt for lunar surface water deposits, to experiments on how cells respond to space, here’s more of what’s aboard @NASAArtemis: https://t.co/56qFqM0uCV pic.twitter.com/Dj1LR7fn3I
— NASA (@NASA) August 15, 2022
“I want to emphasize that this is a test flight,” Nelson said. “It’s just the beginning.
This was the racket’s third trip to the mat. April’s countdown test was marred by fuel leaks and other equipment problems, forcing NASA to return the rocket to the hangar for repairs. The dress test was repeated on the mat in June with improved results.
