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"We will do that as soon as we are able,"

Aug. 17, 2018 by Elizabeth Duran

"We will do that as soon as we are able," he said. "It's a test launch of our Orion. We want to put that in place in the timeframe we need to launch the SLS as soon as possible."

NASA has a solid plan for a manned mission to the Moon, but the company has not announced whether that mission will also test the SLS, which had a pre-flight countdown scheduled to be released after the first launch of the Orion spacecraft.

NASA has been working on putting a rocket into orbit at the Kennedy Space Center on the launch pad, but that will also take about three weeks to complete. NASA's new Orion capsule will not be a test mission, but it will be the first manned mission to see its payloads delivered to a lunar orbit using an instrument called the Lunar Express mission, which will put a lunar satellite into orbit on the SLS rocket.

NASA also hopes the SLS will test the Orion crew capsule and test it against a lunar rover on the SLS rocket.

"It's about the SLS crew capsule and lunar rover, and it's about doing a test mission and testing everything that we have," Bridenstine said. "And that's all we're working on, so I think that will be the first test mission in the Orion crew capsule. It's something that we are working on. So we want to put that in place in the timeframe we need to launch the SLS in June of 2020."

"We have not announced that we are going to do that in June or June of 2020," Bridenstine added. "But we would like to put it in place in the timeframe we need to launch the SLS and test it against a lunar rover in the future. And that's going to be our first test mission in the Orion crew capsule."

The SLS rocket will not have a single landing position, so a landing site on the SLS rocket will have to be set to the moon's surface, as is the case with a planned Orion landing site on the moon, according to NASA and SLS CEO Jeff Bezos.

But Orion has shown the ability to launch a new payload into the atmosphere, allowing it to test the SLS rocket, which has a landing orbit of about 1,100 miles (2,300 kilometers) above the Moon's surface.

"We have a pretty good understanding of how the Saturn V is doing here," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said Wednesday about the SLS in a statement. "