The Voice of America website (VOA) reports that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States. (NASA) transports a Space Launch System (SLS) rocket weighing 2.6 million kilograms, the height of a 32-storey building, to the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at 5 p.m. Thursday. It is broadcast live through the NASA website.
The rocket’s transport will be an ultra-large vehicle that travels slowly over a distance of 4 miles and is estimated to take approximately 11 hours to be transported and mounted on the launch platform.
The rocket, which took more than 10 years to develop, will hold the Orion capsule that will carry a team of astronauts to explore the new moon under NASA’s Artemis program.
The final rocket test will take place on April 3 and is expected to take two days. It will then begin launching an unmanned rocket circling the moon and returning to Earth. In which the final test Orion spacecraft without a passenger pilot will be launched from an SLS rocket to travel thousands of miles through the moon. before returning to Earth a few weeks later.
Howard Hu, NASA’s Orion program manager, said Project Artemis 1 It gathers important information and analyzes the spacecraft’s potential before the start of the Artemis 2 project, which is a manned circumnavigation of the moon. and the Artemis project is to send humans to the surface of the moon again
In addition, NASA also aims to It will bring the first woman and the first black to touch the lunar surface before the end of this decade. including preparing to colonize humans on the moon as well as preparing for future Mars exploration projects It all depends on the results of the SLS launch tests over the next few weeks.