Alex McColgan

While other shuttles have used similar technologies in the past,

SLS is unique in that it can carry extremely heavy payloads, while sending human crews much further than they have ever travelled.

This extra power will be critical for running complex and heavy payload missions, and hopefully end with NASA's horizon goal of a crewed mission to Mars.

Unlike future Artemis missions, Artemis 1 will be uncrewed.

Well, uncrewed by humans.

But the shuttle will have several passengers.

One will be Captain Moonikin Kampos, a mannequin equipped with radiation sensors and acceleration measurement instruments, as well as two phantoms shaped like female torsos.

Keeping them company will be a plush Snoopy and Shaun the Sheep.

While the latter two are presumably just to come along for the ride, Captain Kampos and the phantoms will have important jobs to do.

Captain Campos will be test-wearing the same Orion crew survival system suit that astronauts on future missions will wear during launch and reentry, as well as the Matryoshka Astero-Rad Radiation Experiment, or MARE, which collects data on solar radiation.

The female Phantoms, meanwhile, contain synthetic organs that mimic hard and soft tissue, integrated with hundreds of radiation detectors.

One Phantom will wear an Astero-Rad radiation vest,

and the other will fly unprotected as a control.

NASA plans to send both men and women on future Artemis missions, so it's important to gather information on various health risks specific to both male and female biology.

NASA have sent men to the moon before, but never a woman.

This program will take future crews outside of the Earth's protective magnetic field, where they will be fully exposed to harsh solar and cosmic radiation.

NASA hopes that the information they collect will be useful for protecting future crewed missions from that harm.

If Artemis 1 is successful, NASA has big plans for the near future.

Artemis 2, currently scheduled for launch in 2024, will carry four human crew members on a lunar flyby that will extend 16,000 km beyond the Moon, further than anyone has ever travelled before.

In 2025, Artemis III will carry four crew members into lunar orbit, two of whom will land on the Moon's south pole for the first time.