Our First Look At NASA’s Jaw-Dropping New ‘Mega Moon Rocket’ Now On The Launch Pad For The First Time

It’s real. After 12 years in development, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard yesterday made its first public appearance at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

In front of invited guests and NASA employees the massive rocket—which is 322 feet high and weighs 5.75 million lbs—made a painfully slow 11-hour journey atop a Mobile Launcher vehicle across just four miles/6.5 kilometers from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B.

When it finally launches it will produce 8.8 million lbs. of maximum thrust, which is 15 percent more thrust than the Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo missions to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This is NASA’s “Moon rocket,” designed to take its Orion spacecraft and, ultimately, the landing on the surface of the Moon of the first woman and the first person of color in the mid-2020s. Ironically the dress rehearsal took place just as the full “Worm Moon” was rising in the east.

That Artemis-3 mission will be preceded first by the Artemis-1 mission, the first test of the space hardware, which is due to launch this summer. What happened yesterday was in preparation for Artemis-1—a full “wet” dress rehearsal to verify systems and practice countdown procedures for the first launch.

The two-day test includes loading and unloading 700,000 gallons of cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket’s tanks and going through a full launch countdown. There will be a deliberate halt to the countdown at about 10 seconds to practice a “scrub” or canceled launch and drain the propellants from the rocket.

Artemis-1 is an un-crewed flight test mission lasting 26 days that will fly beyond the Moon. It’s going to involve three slabs of advanced space hardware; NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and its Orion spacecraft, and the European Service Module (ESM).

During Artemis-1 the SLS will launch, orbit the Earth, and then send Orion and the ESM to enter an elliptical orbit of the Moon. It will get to within 62 miles above the lunar surface and then about 40,000 miles beyond it. Three weeks later the Orion spacecraft will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.

If the dress rehearsal goes to plan, NASA will roll the rocket stack back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for final checks and—finally—set an official target date for the launch of Artemis-1.

Exactly when Artemis-1 can launch depends on where the Moon is, the eclipses it causes in space that the solar-powered Orion will have to fly through, and timing it right so it splashes down in the right location.

NASA will review data from the rehearsal before setting a specific target launch date for the Artemis I launch, but we do know that Orion and SLS will roll to the launch pad for a final time about a week before launch. The launch windows are:

• May 7-21, 2022
• June 6-16, 2022
• June 29-July 12, 2022 (but not July 2-4, 2022)

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.