NASA's Moon Rocket Rolls to Launch Pad for Artemis II

The giant NASA rocket that will carry humans back toward the Moon is now sitting on its launch pad in Florida, marking a historic moment in space exploration.

The Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft traveled four miles from NASA's Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B. The slow, careful journey took about 12 hours, with the towering rocket moving at less than one mile per hour on NASA's massive crawler transporter.

Four astronauts will fly aboard Artemis II when it launches February 6 at the earliest. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen will spend 10 days testing the spacecraft that future crews will use to land on the Moon.

The mission will take them further from Earth than any humans have traveled in five decades. They'll loop around the Moon, coming within thousands of kilometers of the lunar surface, while testing Orion's life support, navigation, and propulsion systems.

During their journey, the crew will manually fly the spacecraft to practice maneuvers needed for future Moon landings. For three full hours, they'll observe and photograph parts of the lunar surface that Apollo missions never mapped, using what Koch calls "one of the best scientific instruments we have" - human eyes.

The Ripple Effect

Artemis II is just the beginning of NASA's plan to establish a permanent human presence on and around the Moon. The Artemis III mission, planned for 2027 or 2028, will land astronauts at the Moon's unexplored south pole for the first time.

After that, NASA plans to build Gateway, a small space station orbiting the Moon that will serve as a base for longer lunar stays. Multiple countries will join the effort, with astronauts living and working in lunar orbit while robotic rovers explore the surface below.

The crew sees this mission as humanity's first step toward even bigger questions. "We can answer 'Are we alone?' by going to Mars in the future," Koch explained, "and this mission can be the first step in bringing that answer back to team humanity."

The astronauts will experience challenges no one has faced in decades, including higher radiation levels than the International Space Station and a fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. But their successful flight will prove that the technology works and the path to the Moon is open again.

After half a century away, we're finally going back.