NASA’s new lunar rocket arrived at the launch pad in Florida on Wednesday, set to debut in less than two weeks. NASA plans to launch on August 29 for its lunar test flight. No one will be in the astronaut capsule on the rocket, just three test dummies, armed with sensors to measure radiation and vibrations.
The 98-meter (322-foot) rocket emerged from its huge hangar Tuesday night, drawing a crowd of Kennedy Space Center workers. It took nearly 10 hours for the rocket to be carried 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) to the pad, arriving at dawn.
The Orion capsule will fly around the Moon in a distant orbit for a couple of weeks, before returning for a descent over the Pacific. The flight should last six weeks.
The flight is the first lunar mission in NASA’s Artemis program. The space agency is targeting a manned flight to lunar orbit in two years and a moon landing with astronauts by 2025. That’s much later than NASA anticipated when it established the program more than a decade ago, when it retired the shuttle fleet. . Years of delays have added billions of dollars to the cost.
The new SLS lunar rocket is 12 meters (41 feet) shorter than the Saturn Vs used on the Apollo missions half a century ago, but it is more powerful, using a core stage with four engines and two attached boosters, similar to those used for ferries.
“When you look at the rocket, it almost looks retro. It looks like we’re going back to the Saturn V,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said this month. “But it’s a totally different, new, highly sophisticated rocket and ship.”
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