NASA’s Artemis-1 rocket rollout starts soon. Here’s how to watch.

NASA has never stopped sending probes into the cosmos, but it is in the process of renewing its legacy as a person space explorer.

The US space agency will move its Mega-Moon rocket from storage Tuesday ahead of its first Artemis I mission, an unmanned expedition around the moon that is scheduled to leave Earth as early as August 29.

The first leg of this journey, which NASA has not made since the last Apollo mission in 1972, begins Tuesday as the rocket and spacecraft slowly crawl to the launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Mission leaders are referring to this final deployment as “the first four miles of NASA’s return to the moon,” said Michael Bolger, manager of exploration ground systems at Kennedy Space Center, in a news conference.

Watch a live broadcast of the skyscraper on wheels below or above NASA’s Kennedy Space Center YouTube channel. Live stream begins August 16 at 3:00 p.m. ET, broadcast begins at approximately 9:00 p.m. ET:

This is what the imposing giant looked like when it drove down the “Crawlerway” for a start test in March.

It’s been a long time since NASA had a rocket of this magnitude capable of sending heavy loads of cargo and astronauts into space. The 32-story, 5.75-million-pound rocket — officially known as the Space Launch System, or SLS — isn’t just built to travel to the moon, it’s set to one day make the first manned flight to Mars. Scientific robotic trips to Saturn and Jupiter could also be in his future.

Artemis I, the first in a series of planned voyages named for the Greek goddess and twin of Apollo, is a more than $4 billion launch to fly the Orion capsule farther than any for humans built spaceship has ever flown.

Although this test mission will not involve astronauts, the 42-day spaceflight will allow the United States to send a crew on the next, more complex mission, Artemis II. The first moonwalk by a woman and person of color is expected to occur during Artemis III, scheduled for around 2026.

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For Artemis I, an unmanned Orion will fly a total of around 1.3 million miles, including 40,000 miles beyond the moon, while testing different orbits. Forty-two days after launch, the capsule will land in the Pacific Ocean. A primary purpose of this first mission is to test Orion’s ability to safely reenter Earth’s atmosphere and land in the correct location to allow the Navy to recover, said Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator.

“After its long flight test, Orion will return home faster and hotter than any spacecraft before it. It’s coming back at Mach 32 [speed]. It will hit the Earth’s atmosphere at 32 times the speed of sound. It will enter the atmosphere and give off some of that speed before it begins to descend through the atmosphere,” the former astronaut said during an Aug. 3 briefing. “On the space shuttle we were at Mach 25, which is about 17,500 miles per hour.”

But the mega moon rocket has to warm up first. It will never go faster than 1 km/h on its crawl to the launch pad.