By: Summer Chu

As of last week, NASA has finished it’s a two-day set of tests on the Artemis 1 needed to get the rocket into space and onto the moon. This series of tests, known as the wet dress rehearsal, occurred at the Kennedy Space Station in Florida.

On the actual mission, the SLS rocket will launch an uncrewed Orion on a roughly month-long journey to the moon and back. Artemis 1 will be the first in a series of expeditions to the moon that NASA hopes will pave the way to more and more space exploration expeditions and find a way to sustain human life on the moon with these operations.

This rocket, which NASA has been working on since 2017, for five years, originally named Exploration Mission 1, has finally come together into what is now. These final tests performed have ensured that it can launch soon. Those tests included fueling up Artemis 1’s huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and performing a simulated countdown that took the vehicle and NASA’s Orion capsule through most of the progressions they would endure on launch day before engine ignition. The simulated countdown reached its conclusion at 7:37 p.m. EDT (2337 GMT), bringing an end to the wet dress.

Everything during the tests went smoothly except for a hydrogen leak that caused the entire launch to be 29 seconds off. This did not deter the team working on the rocket though, they were just excited as before. “It’s a great day for our team,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director with the Exploration Ground Systems Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, said during a webcast of the wet dress just after it wrapped up. He added that he was “Really proud of them working through the loading operations and working through terminal count.”