Nasa’s rocket launch to the moon next week aims to close 50-year gap

The Space Launch System moon rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard atop the mobile launcher at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photograph: Joel Kowsky/AP

Fifty years ago this month, mission managers at the US space agency Nasa gave the final go-ahead for what would turn out to be humanity’s most recent odyssey to the moon. Few realized at the time it would be more than half a century before Nasa would be ready to return, not least the Apollo 17 commander, Eugene Cernan, whose belief as he stepped back into the lunar module in December 1972 was that it would be “not too long into the future” that astronauts were there again.

At 1.04am EST (6.04am GMT) on Wednesday, late technical issues and Florida’s weather gods notwithstanding, Artemis 1, the most powerful rocket ship in history, will attempt to close that decades-long gap.