NASA’s Huge Uncrewed SLS Moon Rocket Emerges for Debut Launch

Artemis I will be an uncrewed flight test to send Orion around the Moon and back to Earth on a six-week mission to test the system before the crew takes off on Artemis II.

Through the Artemis mission, NASA will land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon, paving the way for a longer lunar presence and will serve as a stepping stone to send astronauts to Mars, NASA said. .

The 322-foot-tall (98-metre) rocket is set to go on its first mission without humans on August 29. It will be an important, long-delayed demonstration trip to the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program. The United States’ multi-billion dollar effort to return humans to the lunar surface as an exercise in future missions to Mars.

Artemis 1, an uncrewed test flight, will be the first detonation of the massive SLS rocket, which will be the most powerful in the world when it goes into operation.

The Space Launch System, whose development over the past decade has been led by Boeing Co., emerged Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT) from its assembly building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and covered a four-mile (6-kilometer) ) Started ) Track to its launchpad.

At a speed of less than 1mph (1.6kph), the rollout will take approximately 11 hours.

Atop the rocket is NASA’s Orion astronaut capsule, built by Lockheed Martin Corp. It is designed to separate from rockets in space, carry humans to the Moon, and rendezvous with a separate spacecraft that will take astronauts to the lunar surface.

For the Aug. 29 mission, called Artemis 1, the Orion capsule will launch atop the Space Launch System without humans and orbit the Moon before returning to Earth for an ocean splashdown 42 days later.

If the launch is delayed to August 29 due to bad launch weather or a minor technical issue, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has backup launch dates of September 2 and 5.

(with inputs from Reuters)

first article