NASA’s moon rocket is back on the pad for another launch attempt, following more repairs.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket departed its hangar in the middle of the night and completed the 4-mile (6.4-kilometer) trip shortly after sunrise Friday.

NASA is aiming for a launch attempt on Nov. 14, sending an empty crew capsule around the moon and back in a dramatic flight test before astronauts climb aboard in a couple years.

Forecasters are keeping their eyes on potential tropical weather that could interfere.

It is NASA’s biggest step yet to get astronauts back on the moon by 2025. The space agency is nearing the 50th anniversary of its last human moon landing: Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Although shorter, this early version of the rocket is even more powerful than the Saturn V that sent Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Fuel leaks have kept the rocket grounded since August. Then Hurricane Ian forced the rocket back to the hangar at Kennedy Space Center at the end of September. NASA used the time to make repairs and replace critical batteries.

NASA still does not know why hydrogen keeps leaking every time the rocket is fueled, but engineers are confident they can manage any future leaks, said Cliff Lanham, a senior manager.

Spain briefly closed parts of its airspace over the risks posed by a Chinese rocket re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.

Barcelona and Ibiza airports were among those impacted by the grounding, which lasted around 40 minutes on Friday.

The decision came after China sent its powerful Long March 5B rocket to deliver the final module of its Tiangong space station.

A remnant of the rocket is now making an uncontrolled re-entry.

Most of the remnant was expected to burn up during its descent.

But there is some concern some of the remnant – described as one of the largest objects to re-enter the atmosphere in recent years by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency – may survive.

In May 2020, properties in Ivory Coast were damaged when debris from the rocket’s first launch came back down to Earth.

The European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking service has said on its website that the “statistical probability of an impact on the ground in populated areas is low”, with the remnant expected to land somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

However, it warned southern Italy, as well as northern Spain and Portugal were also in the debris’ trajectory.

As a precaution, Spain’s national airspace agency established an 100km (62 mile) wide exclusion zone on either side of the falling rocket’s orbit.

The impact on flights is expected to continue throughout the day.

In the past, America’s space agency, Nasa has called on China to design rockets to disintegrate into smaller pieces upon re-entry, as is the international norm.