MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The US Orion spacecraft is scheduled to conduct its first unmanned flight to the Moon aboard the Space Launch System (SLS) giant rocket in the Artemis I program in February 2022, NASA said on Saturday.

The US space agency announced on Friday that US Artemis engineers had completed the stacking process of putting the Orion spacecraft on top of the SLS rocket at Kennedy Space Center for the Artemis I uncrewed mission around the Moon.

“With stacking complete, a series of integrated tests now sit between the mega-Moon rocket and targeted liftoff for deep space in February 2022,” the agency said in a statement.

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