NASA’s new moon rocket heads to launchpad tests

CAPE CANAVERAL: NASA’s next-generation moon rocket began a highly anticipated, slow-motion journey out of its assembly plant en route to the launch pad in Florida for a final round of tests in the coming weeks that will determine how soon the spacecraft can fly, Reuters reported.

Rollout of the 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion crew capsule marks a key milestone in U.S. plans for renewed lunar exploration after years of setbacks, and the public’s first glimpse of a space vehicle more than a decade in development.

The process of moving the 5.75-million-pound SLS-Orion spacecraft out of its Kennedy Space Centre Vehicle Assembly Building began under clear skies at Cape Canaveral. A nearly full moon rose about 90 minutes later.

The SLS-Orion, which cost some $37 billion (AED135 b) to develop including ground systems, constitutes the backbone of NASA’s Artemis programme, aimed at returning astronauts to the moon and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to eventual human exploration of Mars.

The megarocket — standing taller than the Statue of Liberty — was being slowly trundled to Launch Pad 39B atop an enormous tractor-crawler roughly the size of a baseball diamond, creeping at less than a mile per hour on a 4-mile (6.5-kilometres) journey expected to take about 11 hours. The crawler is operated by a 25-person crew.

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