NASA's Artemis 1 moon rocket to roll out Aug. 18 for lunar launch - Space.com

The agency hopes to launch the epic moon mission 11 days later, on Aug.

NASA's ambitious Artemis 1 moon mission is go to return to the pad, one last time, ahead of launch.

The Artemis 1 stack will make the roughly 4-mile (6.4 kilometers) journey from Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B on Aug.

The rollout will keep Artemis 1 on track to launch on a weeks-long uncrewed journey around the moon no earlier than Aug.

Artemis 1 will put the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion spacecraft through their paces to ensure reliability ahead of astronauts taking a similar ride a few years from now — some making it all the way to the lunar surface, if NASA's plans come to fruition. .

"Our teams have been working extremely hard for a very, very long time to get to this point," Rick LaBrode, lead Artemis 1 flight director at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said in a livestreamed briefing Friday.

Related: NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission: Live updates.

More: NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission explained in photos .

Artemis 1 will mark the first-ever launch for the SLS and just the second for Orion, which went to Earth orbit back in 2014.

Those milestones will kick off an action-packed 42 days in space for Orion, assuming liftoff occurs on Aug.

Mission team members want Orion to show it can come back through Earth's atmosphere safely, can work consistently in a "flight environment" from launch to splashdown, and can keep astronauts safe inside during the retrieval after coming back home!

Related: How NASA's Artemis moon landing with astronauts works.

— NASA's Artemis program of lunar exploration .

— For Artemis moon missions, science will reign supreme.

After the mission will come months of analysis to ensure SLS and Orion are indeed ready to carry humans!