Senior officials of the US space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), confirmed on Friday that the first flight in its new crewed space programme, Artemis, will now take place early next year. Although there had been a growing conviction among space journalists and analysts that Artemis I would not be launched before the end of this year, Nasa had not previously publicly stated that that would indeed be the case. The Orion spacecraft (composed of the Orion capsule and the European Service Module, the latter supplied by the European Space Agency) was mounted on its Space Launch System (SLS) launch rocket last week. This means that the complete rocket/spaceship combination is now fully assembled. While Artemis I will be an uncrewed test flight, the Artemis programme is intended to again land men, and now also women, on the Moon and carry out deeper space missions.
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