NASA's enormous Artemis"mega moon rocket," the most powerful space rocket ever built, has been cleared for yet another attempt to blast off to the moon on Wednesday after surviving 100 mph gusts from Hurricane Nicole.
This will be the fourth time that NASA has tried to launch the rocket. The first two attempts were scrubbed due to a spate of technical issues, including a hydrogen leak and a suspected faulty temperature sensor inside one of the rocket's core stage engines. Then Hurricane Ian, which struck Florida in late September, forced NASA to roll the rocket back to the safety of Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly building, canceling the third launch.
The Artemis 1 mission is an uncrewed test flight of the spacecraft powering NASA's Artemis moon program, which is set to send humans back to our nearest natural satellite and then hopefully onward to Mars. After the rocket leaves Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft's boosters, which generate up to 8.8 million pounds of thrust, will fall away, and the Orion module will zip 40,000 miles beyond the moon before swinging back to Earth.
The Artemis 1 test flight will enable NASA scientists to make vital observations and tweaks before Artemis 2 embarks upon the same journey with a human crew in 2024. Then, in 2025, the Artemis 3 mission will carry the first woman and the first person of color to land on the moon.
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