After a month-long delay, a NASA spacecraft has now returned to its launchpad ahead of the first lunar exploration mission in more than 50 years.
Part of the space agency’s Artemis II mission NASA’s A long-term plan to build a space station called Lunar Gateway, where Astronauts will be able to live and work – It will take the crew further into space than humans have ever gone before.
It was scheduled to launch on February 8, but a liquid hydrogen leak during a practice launch forced the agency to delay the operation.
In a post on its website, NASA said it is now targeting a launch window from April 1 to April 6.
Read more: Everything to know about Artemis II
It said engineers had begun work Thursday night rolling the Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and its Orion spacecraft to launch pad 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A livestream on NASA’s YouTube channel shows that the rocket is now in place.
Elsewhere, the agency said the four-astronaut crew had entered quarantine in Houston, Texas, on Wednesday “to ensure they remain healthy ahead of launch”.
The crew consists of three American astronauts – Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – and Canadian Jeremy Hansen.
During the 10-day mission, the crew on Artemis II will test life support, navigation and communications systems to confirm everything is working properly in deep space.
Many of these tests will be completed while the capsule is still in Earth orbit, so if anything goes wrong the astronauts will be close to home.
The capsule will then enter high Earth orbit, where the crew will manually pilot Orion before handing control back to controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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Artemis I to be launched in November 2022. This ultimately involved sending an empty Orion crew capsule to orbit the Moon to test NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
