CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s massive new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket rolled out to its launch pad Saturday, marking a major milestone ahead of the agency’s first crewed lunar fly-around mission in over 50 years. The long-awaited mission could lift off as early as February.
The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket, topped by the Orion crew capsule, inched out of Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at roughly 1 mile per hour (1.6 kph), completing the four-mile (6-kilometer) journey by nightfall. Thousands of NASA employees and their families braved the predawn chill to witness the historic rollout, cheering as the rocket exited the building originally constructed for the Apollo-era Saturn V launches.
The rollout was led by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and the four astronauts assigned to the mission: crew commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, veteran astronauts Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who will make his first spaceflight. “What a great day to be here,” Wiseman said. “It is awe-inspiring.”
Weighing 11 million pounds (5 million kilograms), the SLS rocket and Orion capsule moved atop a reinforced crawler-transporter, upgraded from its Apollo and space shuttle-era configuration to handle the rocket’s enormous size. This mission will follow a previous uncrewed SLS flight in November 2022, which sent an empty Orion capsule around the moon.
“This one feels a lot different, putting crew on the rocket and taking them around the moon,” said NASA’s John Honeycutt, noting the significance of the first human moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. While the astronauts will not orbit the moon or land, the flight is a critical step in the Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface in upcoming missions.
The 10-day mission will make Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen the first humans to travel to the moon since Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt concluded the Apollo program. Wiseman added, “They are so fired up that we are headed back to the moon. They just want to see humans as far away from Earth as possible discovering the unknown.”
NASA plans to conduct a fueling test of the SLS rocket on the pad in early February before confirming an official launch date. “We have zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until completing the fueling demo,” Isaacman told reporters. The first launch window in February allows only five days before the mission would need to slip into March.
This rollout signifies a key step toward restoring human presence beyond Earth and represents a pivotal moment in NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks sustainable exploration of the moon and preparation for eventual crewed missions to Mars.
Edgardo Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
- EDGARDO HERNAL
- EDGARDO HERNAL
- EDGARDO HERNAL
- EDGARDO HERNAL
