NASA Finally Rolls Out Space Launch System Rocket Ahead of Artemis 1 Mission [LOOK]

The Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's colossal moon rocket, emerged from its assembly facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday. It gave the public a first look at the agency's largest space vehicle since the Apollo period.

Before the deployment on Thursday, NASA sponsored a day of activities and media opportunities at the space center. The launch coincides with NASA's preparations to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 16 mission, which took off on April 16, 1972.

SLS has spent the last year stashed away in NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building, a gigantic warehouse facility at KSC that houses and integrates large rockets. The vehicle's components were piled and tested there, making everything ready for this time, The Verge reported.

NASA Shows Off Giant SLS Rocket in Florida

NASA delivered the gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) rocket to the 39B LaunchPad and the Orion spacecraft that will sit atop it when it begins its mission.

The SLS will stand and provide the world with the first glimpse of the spaceship that will soon travel to the moon and the people that will accompany it.

The space agency transported the SLS rocket, topped with the Orion spacecraft, out of the assembly building by NASA's workhorse Crawler Transporter-2 vehicle shortly after 5:45 p.m. ET on Thursday, March 17.

The voyage to the launchpad is planned to take up to 12 hours, with a peak speed of 1 mph and a few scheduled pauses along the route to check everything is in working order so that we won't see the 332-foot (98.1-meter) SLS rocket on Pad 39B until early Friday.

The Kennedy Space Center's Twitter account shared photographs of the rocket's early phases of flight, and a live stream of the site is also available, but the area is now dark.

The rocket vanishes into the night in this time-lapse from Boeing Space.

NASA Wet Dress Rehearsal Ahead of Artemis 1 Mission

Gizmodo said the rollout is in preparation for the wet dress rehearsal on April 3. The rocket will be filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants and then de-fueled for this test run. NASA crews will also be able to rehearse the countdown during the rehearsal.

It'll be an all-hands-on-deck event, laying the groundwork for the next Artemis 1 mission. SLS will attempt to send an uncrewed Orion capsule to a retrograde orbit around the Moon during that 25-day mission, which is tentatively scheduled for April (but more likely later this summer).

This mission will pave the way for Artemis 2, which is tentatively scheduled for May 2024 and will include a human crew. The major one, Artemis 3, will arrive after that, with a man and a woman landing on the lunar surface.

Check out more news and information on Space in Science Times.