NASA’s latest moon rocket embarked on its journey to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Saturday, setting the stage for astronauts to conduct their first lunar fly-by in over 50 years.

This out-and-back mission could see liftoff as early as February.

The towering 322-foot (98-meter) rocket began its slow, deliberate crawl from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building at dawn, traveling at a leisurely pace of 1 mph (1.6 kph). The 4-mile (6-kilometer) journey stretched into the evening.

Braving the pre-dawn chill, thousands of space center employees and their families gathered to witness this long-anticipated moment, which had been postponed for several years. They eagerly awaited the sight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket emerging from the iconic building, originally constructed in the 1960s for the Saturn V rockets that propelled 24 astronauts to the moon during the Apollo era. Leading the enthusiastic crowd were NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, and the four astronauts selected for this mission.

“What a wonderful day to be here,” declared Reid Wiseman, the mission’s crew commander. “It is truly awe-inspiring.”

The Space Launch System rocket, along with the Orion crew capsule perched atop, weighs a staggering 11 million pounds (5 million kilograms). This colossal entity made its move atop a gigantic transporter, a relic from the Apollo and shuttle programs, which has been upgraded to handle the SLS rocket’s formidable weight.

The first and only other SLS launch – which sent an empty Orion capsule into orbit around the moon – took place back in November 2022.

“This one feels a lot different, putting crew on the rocket and taking the crew around the moon,” NASA’s John Honeycutt said on the eve of the rocket’s rollout.

Heat shield damage and other capsule problems during the initial test flight required extensive analyses and tests, pushing back this first crew moonshot until now. The astronauts won’t orbit the moon or even land on it. That giant leap will take come on the third flight in the Artemis lineup a few years from now.

Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and Christina Koch – longtime NASA astronauts with spaceflight experience – will be joined on the 10-day mission by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, a former fighter pilot awaiting his first rocket ride.

They will be the first people to fly to the moon since Apollo 17’s Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt closed out the triumphant lunar-landing program in 1972. Twelve astronauts strolled the lunar surface, beginning with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969. Only four moonwalkers are still alive; Aldrin, the oldest, turns 96 on Tuesday.

“They are so fired up that we are headed back to the moon,” Wiseman said. “They just want to see humans as far away from Earth as possible discovering the unknown.”

NASA is waiting to conduct a fueling test of the SLS rocket on the pad in early February before confirming a launch date.

“We’ve, I think, zero intention of communicating an actual launch date” until completing the fueling demo, Isaacman told reporters.

The space agency has only five days to launch in the first half of February before bumping into March.

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