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Cape Canaveral, March 17 (BUS): NASA’s next-generation lunar rocket is scheduled to make a highly anticipated slow-moving journey from an assembly plant to its launch pad in Florida on Thursday for a final round of testing in the coming weeks. This will determine when the spacecraft can fly.
The launch of a towering Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with its Orion crew capsule marks a major milestone in US plans to explore the regenerative moon after years of setbacks, and the first overview of a spacecraft in development in more than a decade. .
The move of the 5.75-million-ton, 32-story SLS-Orion spacecraft was scheduled to begin from the vehicle assembly building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT), if you permit. So weather conditions.
The massive rocket, standing higher than the Statue of Liberty, will slowly blast off to Launch Pad 39B aboard a giant crawler, a 4-mile (6.5 km) journey expected to take about 11 hours. The scene will be broadcast live on NASA TV and the space agency’s website.
Forecasts on Wednesday called for favorable conditions along Florida’s Atlantic coast.
The launch, which paved the way for NASA’s unassembled Artemis I mission around the moon and back, was delayed last month due to a series of technical hurdles that the space agency said have since been resolved as teams prepared the rocket for the launch pad.
“We are in very good shape and ready to move forward with this show Thursday,” Artemis launch manager Charlie Blackwell Thompson said earlier in the week while briefing reporters on NASA’s progress.
Once secured in the platform, the SLS-Orion should be ready for a critical pre-flight test called “wet rehearsal,” which will begin on April 3 and take about two days to complete.
Engineers plan to fully load the SLS primary fuel tanks with supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel and conduct a countdown launch simulation seconds before the rocket’s four R-25 engines ignite in a top-down assessment of the entire system, Reuters reported.
The outcome will determine when NASA will attempt its first launch of the rocket and capsule assembly, a mission assigned to Artemis I. SLS-Orion forms the backbone of the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon and establish a long-range moon colony as a prelude to eventual human exploration of Mars.
The US Apollo program sent six manned missions to the Moon from 1969 to 1972, the only manned spaceflights that have not yet reached the lunar surface. Artemis, named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, seeks to land the first woman and first color person on the moon, among others.
But NASA has several steps to take before it gets there, starting with the successful Artemis I flight, planned as an unmanned flight 40,000 miles (64374 km) behind the moon and back. NASA said it is reviewing potential launch windows in April and May, but the schedule could be delayed depending on the results of the exercise.
Eight or nine days after those tests are completed and the propellant has been drained from the rocket, the ship will be returned to the assembly building, pending a launch date.
NASA announced in November that it would aim to achieve the first human lunar landing on Artemis as early as 2025, preceded by an unspecified date with a manned flight from Artemis around the moon and back.
Both of these missions, and the other missions that will follow, will be flown into space by the SLS, which eclipses the Apollo-era Saturn V as the world’s largest and most powerful launch vehicle and the first exploration-class rocket NASA has built for human spaceflight since then. Saturn V.
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