SOURCE: BBC NEWS
The American space agency, NASA, says it is to launch its giant new Moon rocket on Monday the 29th of August, 2022.
NASA officials conducted a flight readiness review late on Monday, May 22, 2022 and concluded there are no substantive technical issues in their way.
The rocket, known as the Space Launch System, will send a capsule, called Orion, on an excursion around the Moon.
Unscrewed this time, astronauts will climb aboard for subsequent missions, assuming all goes to plan.
The SLS will go up from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The vehicle has been given a two-hour window to get off Earth, starting at 12:33 GMT and 13:33 BST.
The launch will be a key moment for Nasa, which, in December, will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the very last human landing on the Moon – Apollo 17.
The agency has vowed to return with its new Artemis programme, using technology that befits the modern era. Nasa sees a return to the Moon as a way to prepare to go to Mars with astronauts sometime in the 2030s or soon after.
This upcoming flight is therefore the first full end-to-end examination of the Artemis exploration hardware.