Artemis I mission ready for launch to Moon and back, Nasa says

Nasa’s Artemis I mission to the Moon is set to launch as planned on 29 August, the space agency’s Flight Readiness Review concluded on Monday.

The American space agency announced that teams are proceeding toward a two-hour launch window opening at 8:33am EDT on Monday, 29 August, from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39B in Florida.

“We are a go for launch, which is absolutely outstanding. This day has been a long time coming,” Nasa associate administrator Bob Cabana said at a press briefing on Monday.

The review assessed the readiness of the nearly 100m-tall stack of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft, which Mr Cabana said will be tested “beyond” its limits during the mission.

“We have analysed risk as best we can and we’ve mitigated also as best we can. But we are stressing Orion beyond actually what it was designed for in preparation for sending it to the Moon with a crew,” the Nasa associate administrator said.

The spacecraft is currently sitting on the launchpad at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Artemis I is a test flight and is Nasa’s first full test of hardware to put astronauts back on the Moon by 2025.

The crewed launch is aimed at propelling a decade of activities on the Moon that could serve as a test for technologies to use ultimately in a future mission to Mars.

Other than the scheduled launch time on 29 August, Nasa also has back up windows planned for 2 and 5 September.

The Orion spacecraft is a capsule, and in the test flight, it would orbit around the Moon and return to the Earth after spending 42 days in space.

It would carry three mannequins to collect data on how a crewed mission would affect human astronauts.

Nasa plans to fly the spacecraft over 64,000km (40,000 miles) beyond the Moon, which would be the furthest distance a vehicle designed to be crewed by humans has ever flown.

The Artemis missions would involve a series of uncrewed and then crewed lunar flybys.

These would then culminate in boots on the Moon, with the first human landing on the lunar surface in over 50 years.

“Our team does have some work to finish up at the [launch] pad, but we are ready, we are going. Go Artemis!” Janet Petro, director of the Kennedy Space Center said during the press briefing.