NASA begins final preparations for maiden flight of $4.1 billion SLS rocket

With one week to go until launch, NASA managers met at the Kennedy Space Center, reviewed flight preparations and cleared the agency's huge $4.1 billion Space Launch System rocket for blastoff next Monday on a test flight heralding an American-led return to the moon.

After an all-day meeting to go over technical details, open issues, the weather and a variety of other factors, the launch team was cleared to press ahead toward the start of a 46-hour 10-minute countdown beginning at 10:23 a.m. ET Saturday, setting the stage for blastoff at 8:33 a.m. Monday at the opening of a two-hour window.

If all goes well, the 322-foot-tall SLS rocket, the most powerful ever built by NASA, will boost an unpiloted Lockheed Martin-built Orion crew capsule and its European Space Agency-supplied service module on a 42-day flight that will carry the spacecraft 40,000 miles beyond the moon and back to Earth for a Pacific Ocean splashdown on Oct. 10.