Orion's flight is supposed to last six weeks from its Florida liftoff to Pacific splashdown, twice as long as astronaut trips in order to tax the systems. The launch is scheduled for Monday morning Aug 29. NASA administrator Bill Nelson takes part in an interview before the scheduled launch of the Artemis 1 rocket at the Kennedy Space Center, Wednesday, Aug. Two hours after liftoff, an upper stage will send the capsule, Orion, racing toward the moon. The core stage will keep firing before separating and crashing into the Pacific in pieces.

The boosters will peel away after two minutes, just like the shuttle boosters did, but won't be fished from the Atlantic for reuse. Unlike the streamlined Saturn V, the new rocket has a pair of strap-on boosters refashioned from NASA's space shuttles. It's called the Space Launch System rocket, SLS for short, but a less clunky name is under discussion, according to Nelson. But it's mightier, packing 8.8 million pounds (4 million kilograms) of thrust. The new rocket is shorter and slimmer than the Saturn V rockets that hurled 24 Apollo astronauts to the moon a half-century ago. Here's a rundown of the first flight of the Artemis program, named after Apollo's mythological twin sister. Add everything up since the program's inception a decade ago until a 2025 lunar landing, and there's even more sticker shock: $93 billion. The price tag for this single mission: more than $4 billion. 29, 2022, the 322-foot rocket will attempt to send an empty crew capsule into a far-flung lunar orbit. The moon sets in front of the NASA Artemis rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard on pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, Wednesday, June 15, 2022, in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Nasa space shuttle liftoff