Watch NASA roll the Artemis 1 moon rocket to the launch pad early Friday
NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket returns to the launch pad Friday morning (Nov. 4) and you can watch the slow-moving action live.
The Artemis 1 stack – a huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket topped with a Orion spacecraft — is scheduled to roll out Friday at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
Artemis 1 will head towards KSC’s Pad 39B, the launching point for the mission, which is targeted for a November 14 launch. The 6.4-kilometer journey, made atop NASA’s giant crawler transporter-2 vehicle, is expected to take approximately 10 hours.
NASA will livestream at least part of this long journey, if previous Artemis 1 deployments are any guideline. Space.com will broadcast that webcast, courtesy of the space agency.
Related: NASA’s Artemis 1 Moon Mission: Live Updates
More: NASA’s Artemis 1 Moon Mission Explained in Photos
This will be Artemis 1’s fourth voyage from the VAB to Pad 39A. The missile made the trek in both March and June to conduct pre-launch tank testing, and went out again in mid-August for an attempted launch.
Glitches thwarted planned launch attempts in late August and early September, and NASA then brought Artemis 1 back to the VAB in late September to shelter from Hurricane Ian.
Mission team members have used this last period in the VAB to carry out some minor repair and maintenance work, along with a series of tests to ensure Artemis 1 is ready to fly.
Artemis 1 is NASA’s first mission Artemis programwhich aims to establish a permanent, sustainable human presence in and around the moon by the end of the 2020s.
Artemis 1 will be the first flight for the SLS and the second for Orion. It will send the unmanned capsule on a shakeout cruise of about a month to lunar orbit and back. If all goes well, Artemis 2 will launch astronauts around the moon in 2024 or so, and Artemis 3 will set up boots at the moon’s south pole a year or two later.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on facebook (opens in new tab).
#Watch #NASA #roll #Artemis #moon #rocket #launch #pad #early #Friday