For the first time in nearly 50 years, a moon rocket has made it to a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The Artemis 1 rocket reached Launch Complex 39B early Friday morning, traveling overnight to make the 4-mile journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad.
While that’s a short distance compared to the trip to the moon — which lies around a quarter-million miles away — the journey marked a key milestone in NASA’s next chapter of deep space exploration.
“It’s a huge moment,” says NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik.
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The Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and other Americans to the lunar surface. Now, the Artemis program —named after Apollo’s twin sister, the goddess of the moon in Greek myth — could soon bring astronauts back to our rocky neighbor after a half-century absence.
Anchoring the program’s first mission is the Space Launch System, a 5-million-pound rocket that stands more than 300 feet tall and is designed to carry NASA’s Orion capsule, a spacecraft that could one day ferry humans to the moon and back.
Read more: NPR
