NASA launches a two-day countdown to the Artemis I mission

() — In about 46 hours, the Artemis I rocket will be ready to take off on an unmanned flight around the Moon, and NASA is counting down the minutes.

The countdown officially began at 9:53 am on Saturday, according to a tweet from NASA’s Artemis account.

The countdown began once the launch teams arrived at their stations at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch timeline has been shaped by the lessons learned from the wet dress rehearsal, held on August 22. The test simulated almost every part of the launch, including loading the spacecraft with jet fuel, but it didn’t get off the ground.

The first orders of business are to fill the water tank for the sound suppression system, prepare the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen systems, power up the Orion spacecraft, power up the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, power up the core stage, and prepare the four RS-25 engines, according to a launch timeline on the NASA website.

The Artemis I rocket is expected to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Monday between 8:33 am and 10:33 am ET, assuming the weather is favorable. The stack, consisting of the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft, stands 98 meters (322 feet) tall.

The Artemis I mission is the first step in NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon, 50 years after the last manned trip to the moon. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will orbit the moon, traveling more than 2.1 million kilometers (1.3 million miles) in just 42 days, before splashing down off the California coast in October.

The launch will lay the groundwork for NASA’s goal of landing the first woman and first person of color on the moon by 2025 and ultimately addressing human exploration of Mars.