Lunar exploration: successful takeoff of the SLS rocket

Launch of the unmanned Artemis 1 lunar rocket from launch pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on November 16, 2022. AFP - JIM WATSON

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2 mins

The most powerful rocket in the world, SLS, took off Wednesday, November 16 for the first time from Florida, for a mission marking the great start of the American program to return to the Moon, Artemis.

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NASA's new moon rocket is quite simply the most powerful launcher ever built, the biggest firecracker ever built by humanity, says

RFI's special correspondent in Florida.

She was supposed to take off at 7:04 a.m. Paris time, there was a delay, even though everything had gone very well in the first hours of the countdown.

Fueling was going perfectly until a liquid hydrogen leak broke out at a valve. NASA had no choice but to send a team, the "

“, on the launch pad, to make the repair directly on the spot, literally with an adjustable wrench to tighten the bolts on the valve, right next to this rocket then loaded with 900 tons of highly explosive fuel.

LIVE NOW: The #Artemis era of exploration begins today with @NASAArtemis I, the first integrated test flight of the rocket and spacecraft that will bring humanity to the Moon.

Watch @NASA_SLS and @NASA_Orion embark on their first voyage.

https://t.co/Ngak08VFb0

— NASA (@NASA) November 16, 2022

There was also another concern, at the level of a radar tracking station, necessary to follow the trajectory of the rocket, and which acted up: it stopped responding.

Like what rocket take-offs hang by a thread, in this case a faulty Ethernet cable.

There again, it had to be changed, tests carried out... All of this put together means that the rocket is a few minutes behind schedule.

For this test flight, launched fifty years after the last flight of the Apollo program, the Orion capsule, which has no astronaut on board, will not land on the Moon but will venture up to 64,000 km behind it. , a record for a habitable ship.

The purpose of this Artemis 1 mission, which should last a little over 25 days, is to verify that this new vessel is safe to transport a crew to the Moon in the next few years.

► To read also: Mission Artemis 1: final preparations for NASA's new lunar rocket

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