NASA rocket finally on its way to moon

NASA took a significant step toward returning astronauts to the lunar surface early Wednesday, launching its massive Space Launch System rocket and lofting the first spacecraft designed to fly humans to the moon since the Apollo era.

Lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center at 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the rocket thundered through the sky above the Florida Space Coast, as hordes of onlookers cheered a new chapter in the history of human exploration.

The flight marked the first launch of the SLS rocket, a towering 322-foot tall beast in development for a decade, and propelled a capsule, known as Orion, toward the moon as part of its Artemis program. Because the mission is a test flight – a rehearsal for future missions – no astronauts were onboard, and the spacecraft won’t land on the moon.

If all goes well, NASA plans another flight, called Artemis

II, with astronauts that will orbit the moon in 2024. A lunar landing is scheduled for 2025 but many think it will be later.

NASA has not sent an astronaut beyond low Earth orbit since the last of the Apollo missions, in 1972, when astronaut Eugene Cernan vowed “we shall return” before he climbed back into the lunar module for the return trip to Earth.

NASA struggled for years to get its SLS rocket off the ground, and briefly during the countdown to Wednesday’s launch there was concern about another setback when NASA detected a leak of liquid hydrogen, the same kind of malfunction that scuttled two previous launch attempts. But NASA dispatched a pair of engineers, along with a safety officer, to the launch pad to tighten some bolts, which successfully stopped the leak, allowing the countdown to continue.