Sharjah24 – Reuters: The highly anticipated rollout of NASA's big new moon rocket to its launch pad in Florida for final tests before a first flight has been delayed by at least a month, until March at the earliest, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday.

NASA, which late last year had targeted liftoff this month for its uncrewed Artemis 1 mission around the moon and back, declined to set a revised launch date, but the delay would preclude a flight before April.

At a briefing for reporters, NASA executives said there were no specific, major difficulties slowing their schedule, but rather a higher-than-usual volume of technical hurdles to clear in preparing a large, complex rocket system for its very first launch.

NASA officials said workforce and supply disruptions related to the recent Omicron-driven surge in COVID-19 infections also were factors in slowing down the work.

The U.S. Apollo program sent six astronauts to the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972, the only crewed spaceflights yet to achieve that feat.

In November, NASA announced that it would aim to achieve the first crewed lunar landing of Artemis, named for the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology, as early as 2025.

But the space agency has several spaceflight stepping stones to meet before it gets there, starting with a successful maiden flight of the SLS and Orion, now in the final stages of pre-launch preparations.

Rollout of the towering spacecraft, a key milestone marking the public's first glimpse of the newly assembled, 36-story-tall rocket-and-capsule vehicle as it is moved, had recently been planned for mid-February.

Under the updated timeframe outlined on Wednesday, the SLS-Orion will be trundled out on a giant crawler-transporter in March - probably around the middle of the month - from its assembly building to Launch Pad 39-B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.