NASA's Artemis 1 moon rocket reaches the launch pad

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March 18th, 2022

The NASA Artemis 1 rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard moves slowly on an 11 hour journey to a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Thursday, March 17, 2022.

John Raoux / John Raoux

For the first time in nearly 50 years, a moon rocket has made it to a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The Artemis 1 rocket reached Launch Complex 39B early Friday morning, traveling overnight to make the 4-mile journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the pad.

While that’s a short distance compared to the trip to the moon — which lies around a quarter-million miles away — the journey marked a key milestone in NASA’s next chapter of deep space exploration.

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