NASA’s Space Launch System is yesterday’s rocket

14th 1972 Eugene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, took a last look around the Taurus-Littrow valley, climbed his lunar module’s ladder and blasted off for home. His were the final footprints so far pressed into the Moon’s surface. Indeed, no human being since then has ventured more than a few hundred kilometres from Earth.Nor will that change on August 29th, the current scheduled lift off, from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, of the first flight of ’s Space Launch System (), heir to the mighty Saturn Vs that carried the Apollo project to the Moon, and putative workhorse of the Artemis programme, Apollo’s tardy follow-up, which has its eyes first on the Moon and then on Mars. Instead, the will send a capsule called Orion, carrying three mannequins wired with radiation sensors, to the Moon’s vicinity. This will arrive, if all goes well, on September 3rd. And if it continues to go well, people (four of them) will follow the dummies into lunar orbit in 2024, and a further two will make new footprints, perhaps at the Moon’s south pole, in 2025.