WEB DESK
The American space agency says it is “go” to launch its giant new Moon rocket next Monday.
Nasa officials conducted a flight readiness review late on Monday and concluded there were no substantive technical issues in their way.
The rocket, known as the Space Launch System, will send a capsule, called Orion, on an excursion around the Moon.
Uncrewed this time, astronauts will climb aboard for subsequent missions, assuming all goes to plan.
The SLS will go up from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
The vehicle has been given a two-hour window on the Monday to get off Earth, starting at 08:33 local time (12:33 GMT; 13:33 BST).
“We actually had no actions coming out of the review and we had no dissenting opinions,” said Jim Free, Nasa’s associate administrator for exploration systems development.
The launch will be a key moment for Nasa, which, in December, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the very last human landing on the Moon – Apollo 17.
The agency has vowed to return with its new “Artemis programme”, using technology that befits the modern era (Artemis was Greek god Apollo’s twin sister and goddess of the Moon).
Nasa sees a return to the Moon as a way to prepare to go to Mars with astronauts sometime in the 2030s or soon after.
“You know, right now more than half the world’s population has never seen anybody walk on another world, so in many ways it is going to be their first moon walk,” said Keith Cowing, the editor of the Nasa Watch website which covers Nasa news.
“We do things differently, everything is instant, everything’s going to be in HD… It’s going to be exciting and noisy, but at the end of the day eventually we’re going to be sending humans to walk on another world and again hopefully maybe this time it’ll be a global effort, not two countries competing with each other,” he told BBC News.
SLS and Orion have been in development for over a decade and have cost, in each case, more than $20bn to get to this point.
Orion has actually flown before, once, on a near-Earth test outing in 2014. But that used an existing commercial rocket to get into space. This upcoming flight is therefore the first full end-to-end examination of the Artemis exploration hardware.
