Rebecca Murrell

Well, it's a very exciting mission.

It's going to be a 10-day mission to the moon and back home again.

For the first two days, the astronauts are going to be orbiting around the Earth and they're going to be checking out their spacecraft because basically humans haven't flown in the Orion spacecraft before.

So they need to check all systems are OK.

And then mission control will hopefully give them the go-ahead to go to the moon.

It takes about four days for them to get to the moon.

They'll be flying around the far side of the moon and hopefully seeing...

bits of the moon that haven't been seen with human eyes before.

The far side of the moon is the side we can't see from here on Earth.

And then they'll be making their way back home.

So they're not landing on the moon this time.

That's for Artemis 3, but they are flying around it.

And the rocket is going to be reaching incredible speeds eventually.

Today, we saw it moving really, really, really slowly.

So the rocket is nearly 100 metres tall.

It weighs about 5,000 tonnes.

It's carried on the back of this sort of monster machine called a crawler transporter.

So the entire journey takes up to 12 hours.

And the Apollo missions were all about a race with the Soviet Union.

This time around, it's with China, who've been pushing ahead to get to the moon.