Brian Cox outlines top 3 goals of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission launch ‘Different to Apollo’

In that way, the launch exercise was serving essentially as a real-time dress rehearsal that hopefully would conclude with an actual, successful liftoff.

For now, NASA officials said, plans call for keeping the 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion astronaut capsule on its launch pad to avoid having to roll the massive spacecraft back into its assembly building for a more extensive round of tests and repairs.

If all goes as hoped, the SLS will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Saturday afternoon, during a two-hour launch window that opens at 2.17pm, sending the Orion on an uncrewed, six-week test flight around the moon and back.

The long-awaited voyage would kick off NASA’s moon-to-Mars Artemis program, the successor to the Apollo lunar project of the 1960s and ’70s before US human spaceflight efforts shifted to low-Earth orbit with space shuttles and the International Space Station.

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Article source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1662791/brian-cox-nasa-artemis-1-mission-apollo-moon-colonisation-latest-vn