Watch NASA’s Artemis Moon Rocket Roll Out to the Launchpad - The New York Times

The giant Space Launch System is getting an early start ahead of its lunar journey, which is scheduled to start on Aug.

For the past month and a half, the Space Launch System rocket, which is the most powerful since the Saturn V that took astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, has been parked in a building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This all leads to the launch of NASA’s Artemis I mission, an uncrewed test of the giant rocket and the Orion spacecraft where astronauts will one day sit.

It is about 4.2 miles from NASA’s huge Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpad, which is known as Launch Complex 39B.

The rocket and launch tower will sit on a gigantic vehicle that NASA calls a crawler-transporter.

Technicians will be making final preparations, including hooking up power and propellant lines to the rocket and the launch tower.

The Space Launch System and Orion are two of the core components of NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the surface of the moon in the coming years.

Getting there requires a rocket powerful enough to push a large spacecraft out of low-Earth orbit to the moon, some 240,000 miles away.

NASA then rolled the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to conduct repairs.

The rocket headed back for the Vehicle Assembly Building once again for final preparations, including the installation of the flight termination system, which would blow up the rocket in case something went wrong during launch and eliminate the possibility of crashing into a populated area.