Cape Canaveral, Fla., Nov 16 (Reuters/GNA) – NASA’s towering next-generation moon rocket blasted off from Florida early on Wednesday on its debut flight, a crewless voyage inaugurating the U.S. space agency’s Artemis exploration program 50 years after the final Apollo moon mission.
The 32-story Space Launch System (SLS) rocket surged off the launch pad from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 1:47 a.m. EST (0647 GMT), to send its Orion capsule on a three-week test journey.
About 90 minutes after launch, the rocket’s upper stage fired thrusters for a “trans-lunar injection” burn propelling Orion out of Earth orbit on course for the moon. That put the capsule on track for a 25-day flight that will bring it to within 60 miles (97 km) of the lunar surface before sailing 40,000 miles (64,374 km) beyond the moon and back to Earth.
Liftoff came on the third attempt at launching the long-delayed, multibillion-dollar rocket, after 10 weeks beset by numerous technical mishaps, back-to-back hurricanes and two excursions trundling the spacecraft out of its hangar to the launch pad.
Wednesday’s launch was not without its own drama. A three-man “red team” was scrambled out to the launch pad in the final hours of the countdown to tighten bolts on a loose connection identified as the source of a potentially flight-thwarting fuel leak.
Although specially trained to venture into the “blast zone” around a fully fueled rocket, the three were later hailed as heroes who may well have saved the mission.
“It’s a great day,” a beaming NASA chief Bill Nelson later said in a brief post-launch webcast interview.
GNA
Credit: Reuters