ISTANBUL

NASA is set to unveil its most powerful rocket to date on Saturday ahead of a mission that will carry astronauts around the Moon and back for the first time in over 50 years.

The 322-foot (98-meter) Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, topped with the Orion capsule, will begin a slow 4-mile (6-kilometer) rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center ahead of the crewed Moon mission.

The Artemis II mission is planned to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as early as Feb. 6, sending its crew on a 685,000-mile journey around the Moon before returning about 10 days later with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

The mission will be the second test flight of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and the first to carry astronauts.

The four-member crew will stay aboard the Orion capsule, where they will test life-support and communication systems and rehearse docking maneuvers.

The mission will mark a second trip to space for NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, while Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will fly for the first time.

Koch is set to become the first woman and Glover the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit.

The crew will neither land on the Moon nor enter lunar orbit, but they will become the first humans to fly around it since Apollo 17 in 1972. The mission comes after an uncrewed test in 2022 and is seen as a key step toward Artemis III, which aims to land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole as early as next year.