Excitement builds as NASA’s moon rocket readies for liftoff

Tens of thousands of spectators gather in Cape Canaveral for launch of NASA’s Artemis mission to return humans to the moon.

NASA’s most powerful rocket yet is set to blast off on its debut test flight, kicking off the United States space agency’s mission to take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars.

Fifty years after the last Apollo mission, the Artemis mission will get underway with the blast off of the unmanned Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at 8:33 am (12:33 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday.

Tens of thousands of people, including US Vice President Kamala Harris, are expected to watch the launch, with hotels around Cape Canaveral booked out for the event.

“This mission goes with a lot of hopes and dreams of a lot of people. And we now are the Artemis generation,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on Saturday.

The goal of the six-week test flight, named Artemis 1, is to test the SLS and the Orion crew capsule that sits atop the rocket. The capsule will orbit the moon to see if the vessel is safe for people in the near future.

In lieu of astronauts, three test dummies are strapped into the capsule to measure vibration, acceleration and radiation, one of the biggest hazards to humans in deep space.

Agencies