NASA moon rocket makes day-long journey to launch pad
NASA’s giant new moon rocket is heading to the launch pad in preparation for astronauts’ first flight around the moon in more than half a century.
The round trip can start as early as February.
The 98-foot rocket began moving at 1 mile per hour from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at dawn. The six-kilometer walk can last until the evening.
Thousands of space center workers and their families gathered in the pre-dawn cold to witness the long-awaited event that had been postponed for years.
They gathered together before the Space Launch System rocket, built in the 1960s to house the Saturn V rockets that sent 24 astronauts to the moon during the Apollo program, exited the building.
The cheering crowd was led by NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, and the four astronauts assigned to the mission.
The Space Launch System rocket, weighing five million kilograms, and the Orion crew capsule on top of it took off on a huge carrier used in the Apollo and shuttle eras. It was upgraded for the extra weight of the SLS rocket.
The first and only SLS launch, sending an empty Orion capsule into orbit around the moon, took place in November 2022.
“It’s a very different feeling, putting the crew on the rocket and taking the crew around the moon,” NASA’s John Honeycutt said on the eve of the rocket’s launch.
Heat shield damage and other capsule problems during the first test flight required extensive analysis and testing and delayed the crew’s first lunar breakthrough until now. Astronauts will not orbit the moon or even land on it. This giant leap will occur a few years from now on the third flight of the Artemis series.
Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Christina Koch, NASA astronauts with long spaceflight experience, will join Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a former fighter pilot, on the 10-day mission as he awaits his first rocket ride.
They will be the first people to fly to the moon since Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed the successful moon landing program in 1972. In 1969, twelve astronauts roamed the lunar surface, starting with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
NASA expects to conduct a fueling test of the SLS rocket on the pad in early February before confirming the launch date. Depending on how the demo goes, “that will ultimately determine our path to launch,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said Friday.
The space agency has just five days to launch in the first half of February before entering March.
