NASA has sent the Artemis I rocket back to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center for testing later this month, looking to get back on track for a potential moon launch as early as August.

The 5.75 million-pound, 322-foot-tall combination of the Space Launch System, Orion capsule and mobile launcher left the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center early Monday to make the 4.4-mile slow crawl to Launch Pad 39-B.

The rocket still needs to run through a complete wet dress rehearsal during which NASA will fill and drain the core and upper stage with 730,000 gallons of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen while also simulating a countdown but without lighting the engines.

It first rolled out to the launch pad back in March, but several issues scrubbed three test run attempts forcing the rocket back to the VAB, but now mission managers hope their headaches are behind them.

"I think we've got a pretty good plan in place. We'll see how it turns out as we get into our next attempt, but I certainly think we've learned a lot and figured out a lot of specific things and how you want to do this dance," said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA's deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet on Tuesday urged Europe to seize the momentum created by its newfound diplomatic unity and "start moving now" to develop its own human spaceflight capacity.

The charismatic engineer and pilot, 44, recently completed his second deployment to the International Space Station on the NASA-SpaceX Crew-2 mission, and has arguably the highest profile among the European Astronaut Corps, in addition to being a celebrity in his native France.

Though he has long extolled international cooperation in space and remains in the mix to possibly go to the Moon as part of the NASA-led Artemis missions, Pesquet said it was vital for Europe's leaders to give the European Space Agency (ESA) the funding and mandate it needs to launch its own people, too.

The main body of NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft has been delivered to the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Over the next two years there, engineers and technicians will finish assembling the craft by hand before testing it to make sure it can withstand the journey to Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

The spacecraft body is the mission's workhorse.