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Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, have voted in a historic poll to decide whether they want to be represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The results are not expected until next week – but if they say yes, it will become Amazon’s first US union.

Amazon argues its wages and benefits are industry-beating and has gone into battle to persuade workers to vote no.

Most agree the outcome could have major implications for US labour laws.

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Peter Romer-Friedman, principal of law firm Gupta Wessler PLLC, said: “The key question in America at the moment is are we going to have fair treatment of workers in the businesses that will dominate our future?

“There will be ramifications for the real economy but also for tech firms.

In the US, Amazon has 800 facilities staffed by 950,000 full- and part-time workers – and it should be said many do not feel the need to join a union.

And for those who do, this is not primarily a wages issue – in fact, Amazon pays workers an average of $15 (£11) a hour, plus benefits.

But most agree conditions in its warehouses can be hard – the job is very demanding and lots of workers complain of back pain or other physical niggles as a result of working long hours, often standing in the same position.

Others talk about the mental-health toll of repeated tasks or feeling like they are a cog in a very big machine that does not always listen to their problems.

And there are a lot of things workers feel they do not have control of, such as shift patterns, time off, sick leave and being fired.

One of the most controversial features is time off task (TOT).

When a worker is clocked in, Amazon’s computer system calculates which hours of a shift are on or off task, based on whether or not an item is scanned.

And some say they feel dehumanised by technology watching their every move.

Do workers really have to urinate in bottles?
Amazon issued an extraordinary tweet last week, in response to US congressman Mark Pocan repeating an oft-heard complaint workers sometimes urinated in bottles because they did not feel they had time to visit the toilet.

“Paying workers $15 an hour doesn’t make you a ‘progressive workplace’ when you union-bust and make workers urinate in water bottles,” he wrote.

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View original tweet on Twitter
Amazon News replied: “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?

“If that were true, nobody would work for us.”

Amazon’s tweet was shared thousands of times, with most people saying it reflected badly on the company.

The claim can be traced back to James Bloodworth, who worked undercover at a UK warehouse while researching his book on low-paid British workers.

And he responded to the Amazon News tweet by tweeting: “I was the person who found the pee in the bottle.

A series of allegations levelled at Amazon over its attempts to disrupt the union include:

It altered a traffic-light system outside the warehouse, to give union officials less time to leaflet workers
It unsuccessfully tried to appeal against a National Labour Relations Board ruling allowing workers to vote by mail
It bombarded workers with texts, posters and signs encouraging them to vote no
It ran anti-union ads on its streaming platform, Twitch, which were later removed
At the time, RWDSU president Stuart Appelbaum said: “Amazon is leaving no stone unturned, including ads on Twitch – in its efforts to deceive and intimidate their employees into voting against the union.”

In September, the company briefly advertised for two intelligence analysts whose work duties would include keeping an eye on union activity – but after becoming national news, the advert was removed.

What does Amazon say?
Amazon told BBC News: “RWDUS membership has fallen 25% during Stuart Appelbaum’s tenure – but that is no justification for Mr Appelbaum to misrepresent the facts.

“Our employees know the truth – starting wages of $15 or more, health care from day one, and a safe and inclusive workplace.

“We encouraged all of our employees to vote – and their voices will be heard in the days ahead.”

How else has it responded?
In recent days, Amazon has stepped up its public-relations drive – but with fairly mixed results.

One of its security engineers had even thought the Amazon News account had been hacked, as its tweets seemed “unnecessarily antagonistic”, The Intercept reported.

As well as the tweet about urinating in bottles, it also fired back aggressively at Democratic Party politicians, including Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Saunders.

And it has also been accused of using fake Twitter accounts to put a positive spin on working at the company.

Amazon itself admitted one of these accounts was not that of an actual worker, without saying whether the company had created it.

Has Covid played a part?
The company’s net sales in 2020 increased by 38% – and it hired more than 500,000 additional staff.

But behind the scenes there has been huge pressure on warehouse staff to keep supplying the goods so many people in lockdown were ordering.

Chris Smalls, one of a handful of employees to raise questions in the early days of the pandemic about how safe conditions in warehouses were, was sacked, with Amazon saying he had broken social-distancing rules.

And in February, New York state’s attorney general sued Amazon, claiming it failed to adequately protect its warehouse workers from Covid risks.

Union membership in the US is unusually low – just 6.3% of the private-sector workforce, according to the labour department.

In comparison, Amazon workers in Japan, the UK, Germany, Italy , France and Poland are all unionised.

In Germany a recent four-day strike was called over pay and conditions, while in Italy Amazon workers held a 24-hour strike over what they described as exhausting work rates and “management by algorithm”.

A data leak involving personal details of hundreds of millions of Facebook users is being reviewed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC).

The database is believed to contain a mix of Facebook profile names, phone numbers, locations and other facts about more than 530 million people.

Facebook says the data is “old”, from a previously-reported leak in 2019.

But the Irish DPC said it will work with Facebook, to make sure that is the case.

Ireland’s regulator is critical to such investigations, as Facebook’s European headquarters is in Dublin, making it an important regulator for the EU.

The most recent data dump appears to contain the entire compromised database from the previous leak, which Facebook said it found and fixed more than a year and a half ago.

But the dataset has now been published for free in a hacking forum, making it much more widely available.

It covers 533 million people in 106 countries, according to researchers who have viewed the data. That includes 11 million Facebook users in the UK and more than 30 million Americans.

Not every piece of data is available for every user, but the large scale of the leak has prompted concern from cyber-security experts.

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The DPC’s deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said the recent data dump “appears to be” from the previous leak – and that the data-scraping behind it had happened before the EU’s GDPR privacy legislation was in effect.

“However, following this weekend’s media reporting we are examining the matter to establish whether the dataset referred to is indeed the same as that reported in 2019,” he added.

Phone issues
Despite the claims of the data being “old”, some security researchers remain concerned due to the unchanging nature of the data involved.

Phone numbers, for example, are unlikely to have changed for many people in the past two to three years, and other information – such as a date of birth or hometown – never change.

Alon Gal, a well-known personality in cyber-security circles who tweets as @UnderTheBreach, wrote that the phone number database first appeared in January, where hackers could look up the phone database for a small fee.

But the widespread leak of the database “means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked,” he tweeted.

“I have yet to see Facebook acknowledging this absolute negligence of your data,” he added.

This is a cautionary tale on a colossal scale.

It’s actually terrifyingly common for companies to store customer data in large, unsecured databases.

Often they are discovered by well-meaning security researchers and are either deleted or made safe swiftly before the bad guys stumble upon the treasure trove.

However, sometimes it’s too late.

This case highlights that a company’s defence “we’ve fixed it now” is not good enough.

The horse had bolted long before the stable doors were closed. And clearly, the horse has been having a field day for years since.

The database has likely changed criminal hands many times before now being offered for free.

Facebook may claim this is “an old story”, but clearly it’s one that keeps coming back to bite it – and, more importantly, its users.

Presentational grey line
Troy Hunt, a security expert who runs HaveIBeenPwned – an online service for users to check if their information has been involved in a data breach – said queries were six times higher than normal since news of the database’s release broke.

He also suggested that the leaked dataset could be very useful “for a targeted attack where you know someone’s name and country” – though it would be much harder to use for a blanket mass cyber-attack.

“But for spam based on using phone number alone, it’s gold,” he added.

“Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days and now there’s hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorised by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender.”

Google is changing its work-from-home policy as it looks to get more people back into its US offices.

The tech firm will only allow employees to work from home for more than 14 days a year if they apply for it.

Google will continue its current work-from-home arrangements until 1 September but will allow people to return voluntarily from next month.

The tech giant was one of the first companies to offer working from home when the pandemic struck last year.

“It’s now been a year since many of us have been working from home, and the thought of returning to the office might inspire different emotions,” Fiona Cicconi, Google’s head of people operations, wrote in a company email on Wednesday.

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Google is currently preparing for a broad reopening in September, when employees will be expected to be in the office for at least three days a week.

Until then, the initial return period will be voluntary as offices slowly reopen with limited capacity, based on vaccine availability and a downward trend in Covid-19 cases.

When staff are required to officially return to Google’s offices in September, they “won’t look exactly the way you remember them” but “will include meals, snacks and amenities where possible,” Ms Cicconi said.

“We will even be welcoming our Dooglers back,” she added, referring to Google’s bring-your-dog-to-work group. There is now a dog park at its Mountain View campus called The Doogleplex.

The company is advising workers to get vaccinated against Covid-19, but is not making it mandatory for returning to the workplace.

Google says more long-term work-from-home arrangements are available. Staff can apply for up to 12 months in “the most exceptional circumstances.

Different approach
Google is taking a different approach from its tech rivals who have allowed most staff can continue remote work indefinitely. Twitter has said it will allow most of its employees to work from home permanently.

A number of big companies have plan to test so-called hybrid work arrangements, where employees split their time between home and office.

“None of us have this all figured out,” said Carolyn Everson, vice president of Facebook’s global business group, when talking about current work-from-home arrangements.

“We are making this up on the fly. The reality is we are all trying to figure it out together,” the senior Facebook executive told a panel hosted by Bloomberg.

Facebook will start to reopen its Silicon Valley offices at the beginning in May, after more than a year of working from home during the global pandemic.

Its largest offices won’t reach 50% capacity until early September, it said.

German carmaker Volkswagen will not change its name to “Voltswagen” in the US despite earlier saying it would in a press release.

The name change was in fact an April Fool’s joke that was leaked to the media several days early by mistake.

It was initially said to mark VW’s shift to electric vehicles, and was backed by US boss Scott Keogh.

The carmaker will put out an official press release clearing up the matter on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the carmaker went as far as changing its name on its US website and even launched a new Voltswagen Twitter handle.

It denied speculation it was just a prank, leading to numerous media outlets picking up the story, including BBC News.

‘Changing a K for a T’
In the press release, Mr Keogh said: “We might be changing out our K for a T, but what we aren’t changing is this brand’s commitment to making best-in-class vehicles for drivers and people everywhere.

“This name change signifies a nod to our past as the peoples’ car and our firm belief that our future is in being the peoples’ electric car.”

Some had remained unconvinced, though.

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View original tweet on Twitter
The Volkswagen Group has long supported the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement and aims to become carbon neutral by 2050.

VW has also committed to sell one million electric vehicles worldwide by 2025.

But its environmental record was damaged by the diesel emissions scandal of 2015. The firm admitted to installing software that was capable of cheating emissions tests in 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide.

As a result it has faced huge fines and compensation claims in Europe and the US, and two VW employees have received jail terms in America.

A young child inadvertently sparked confusion over the weekend by posting an unintelligible tweet to the official account of US Strategic Command.

The agency is responsible for safeguarding America’s nuclear weapons.

Some social-media users feared the account may have been hacked.

But it has since been revealed a young member of the account’s social-media manager’s family was responsible for posting the tweet, “;l;;gmlxzssaw”, which was then deleted within minutes.

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View original tweet on Twitter
News website The Daily Dot revealed the accident, after a Freedom of Information request to the agency.

“The command’s Twitter manager… momentarily left the command’s Twitter account open and unattended,” the response said, adding he had been working from home.

“His very young child took advantage of the situation and started playing with the keys and unfortunately, and unknowingly, posted the tweet,” it said.

A spokesman also confirmed suggestions the account had been hacked were false.

“Absolutely nothing nefarious occurred,” the statement added.

The trade union Unite is setting up a hotline for Amazon staff to complain about their treatment at work.

Organiser Sharon Graham told the BBC it was time the internet retail giant shared its “bonanza profits with the workers who help make them”.

Amazon had its most lucrative year ever in 2020, helped by a surge in online shopping during the pandemic.

The company said it offered its staff “excellent” pay, benefits and career opportunities, plus “safe” conditions.

It added that it was “proud” to have created 10,000 jobs in the UK last year.

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Ahead of the hotline’s launch on Monday, Unite said it wanted to agree a “social contract” with Amazon and for the company to recognise trade unions.

These changes, Ms Graham argued, would help secure higher wages and end “relentless” work targets.

She said staff needed to speak about “the exploitation they suffer day after day as a consequence of Amazon’s merciless drive for profit”.

Ms Graham – who is planning to run in the contest to replace current Unite general secretary Len McCluskey when he steps down next year – told the BBC the hotline was “not a stunt” and the union was “in this for the long haul”.

It wants to hear from staff who have had “had timed toilet breaks”, done “back-breaking piece work with never-ending targets”, had “compulsory” overtime imposed and needed to talk about “the horrendous record of injuries on the job”, she said.

‘Critical role’
But Amazon rejected Unite’s criticisms, with a spokesman saying: “The fact is we already offer our employees excellent pay, excellent benefits and excellent opportunities for career growth, all while working in a safe, modern work environment.”

He added that the company’s “competitive wages” started at £9.70 or £10.80 per hour, depending on location, and he would “encourage anyone to compare this to the wages and benefits offered by other retailers”.

“We’re proud to have created 10,000 new permanent roles across the UK in 2020, taking our total permanent UK workforce to more than 40,000,” the spokesman said.

“Our people have played a critical role in serving customers in these unprecedented times and the new roles help us continue to meet customer demand and support small and medium-sized businesses selling on Amazon.”

Facebook has removed a group of China-based hackers it says targeted members of the Uighur community living abroad.

It said hackers used malicious websites and apps to infect devices and allow for remote surveillance, with journalists and activists targeted.

A majority of the cyber attacks didn’t happen directly on Facebook but used the social media platform to share links to infected sites.

This is not the first time hackers have been accused of such activity.

The Uighurs are originally from the north-western region of Xinjiang in China and those targeted are currently living in places including Turkey, the United States, Australia and Canada.

“This activity had the hallmarks of a well-resourced and persistent operation, while obfuscating who’s behind it,” Facebook’s Mike Dvilyanski, head of cyber espionage investigations, and Nathaniel Gleicher, head of security policy, said in a blog post.

Facebook said it removed accounts – which totalled fewer than 100 – it found to have been created by the hackers, a group known as Earth Empusa or Evil Eye.

It believes fewer than 500 accounts were targeted.

Facebook says some of the ways the group infected devices included:

creating fake Uighur-themed apps for the Android app store, including a prayer app and a dictionary app
posing on Facebook as journalists, students, human rights advocates or members of the Uighur community, building trust and tricking them into clicking on malicious links
creating look-alike websites for popular Uighur and Turkish news websites
The Chinese Embassy in Washington has yet to comment.

China is facing mounting criticism from around the world over its treatment of the mostly Muslim Uighur population in Xinjiang.

Rights groups believe China has detained more than a million Uighurs over the past few years.

China denies allegations of abuse, saying camps in the region are “re-education” facilities used to combat terrorism.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has warned about what it calls “huge gaps” in UK employment law over the use of artificial intelligence at work.

The TUC said workers could be “hired and fired by algorithm”, and new legal protections were needed.

Among the changes it is calling for is a legal right to have any “high-risk” decision reviewed by a human.

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said the use of AI at work stood at “a fork in the road”.

“AI at work could be used to improve productivity and working lives. But it is already being used to make life-changing decisions about people at work – like who gets hired and fired.

“Without fair rules, the use of AI at work could lead to widespread discrimination and unfair treatment – especially for those in insecure work and the gig economy,” she warned.

Many workplaces already use automated decision making for simple tasks. For example, Uber assigns driving jobs to its drivers automatically, by computer, and Amazon is known to use AI monitoring systems to watch its staff in its warehouses.

And many firms already use an automated system with no human oversight in the first stage of the hiring process, to narrow the field.

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But as AI becomes more sophisticated, the fear is that it will be entrusted with more serious, high-risk decisions, such as analysing those performance metrics to figure out who should be first in line for promotion – or being let go.

That can happen even when a human is involved, a TUC report warns, thanks to automated decision making.

Human agency
“A human might undertake some formal task, such as handling a document, but the human agency in the decision is minimal,” the authors write.

“Sometimes the human decision making is largely illusory, for instance where a human is ultimately involved only in some formal way in the decision what to do with the output from the machine.”

The TUC’s report, written with the aid of employment rights lawyers and the AI Law Consultancy, argues that the law has failed to stay abreast of quick progress in AI in recent years.

The union body is calling for:

An obligation on employers to consult unions on the use of “high risk” or “intrusive” AI at work
The legal right to have a human review decisions
A legal right to “switch off” from work and not be expected to answer calls or emails
Changes to UK law to protect against discrimination by algorithm
Discrimination by algorithm has been well-documented in recent years, often as an unintentional side-effect of using systems that fail to account for racial bias.

One high-profile example is in facial recognition technology, which has in the past been trained to recognise white faces more easily than those from other backgrounds. Such problems led IBM to abandon some of its efforts with the technology last year, labelling it as “biased”.

The TUC also pointed to recent reports of allegations from delivery drivers for Uber Eats who claimed they had been fired because the facial recognition software was unable to recognise their faces.

That led to drivers with 100% ratings and thousands of deliveries under their belts being fired for failing to complete an ID check, the affected drivers claimed. Uber denies this, saying a human review is always involved before it drops drivers from its platform.

‘Exceptionally dangerous’
The authors of the report for the TUC, Robin Allen and Dee Masters from Cloisters law firm, said while AI could be beneficial, “used in the wrong way it can be exceptionally dangerous”.

“Already important decisions are being made by machines,” the pair said in a joint statement.

“Accountability, transparency and accuracy need to be guaranteed by the legal system through the carefully crafted legal reforms we propose. There are clear red lines, which must not be crossed if work is not to become dehumanised.”

More than 6,000 cases of Covid-related fraud and cyber-crime have been recorded by the UK’s police forces during the pandemic.

The Action Fraud team said £34.5m had been stolen since 1 March 2020.

It covers activity in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but not Scotland.

In a related development, the National Cyber Security Centre has told the BBC it is tackling about 30 “significant attacks” a month against the country’s pandemic response infrastructure.

These involves attempts to breach the NHS, vaccine producers and vaccine supply chains, among other organisations.

“There unfortunately have been a number of successful ransomware incidents against businesses – I can think of roughly around 10,” NCSC operations director Paul Chichester said.

Twin peaks
Other figures disclosed by City of London Police, which co-ordinates efforts to combat fraud, include:

more than 150 related arrests were made since the pandemic began
more than 2,000 websites, phone numbers and email addresses linked to the crimes were taken down
there was a total of 416,000 reports of fraud and cyber-crime
The activity peaked between April and May 2020, and January 2021 – both times when lockdowns were in force.

But this may be the tip of the iceberg.

The National Crime Agency estimates that just one in five fraud cases are typically reported to the police.

And the volunteer-run Cyber Helpline told the BBC only a quarter of those who had contacted it after a cyber-attack said they had also reported the incident to the police.

Bank loan scam
Many of the scams involved conning people out of their money and financial details by focusing on internet shopping.

Related fraud was 42% higher over the pandemic than the preceding year, as criminals took advantage of the fact many physical stores had been forced to close.

Anna – not her real name – from Cheltenham was one of thousands of people who received an SMS message asking her to go online and rearrange a parcel delivery.

She filled in her details, but later suspected something was wrong. She alerted her bank and cancelled her bank card.

“I thought, now I have nothing to worry about, everything is fine and case closed,” she told the BBC.

But the criminals used the details they had already obtained to authorise her bank to credit her account with a £9,000 loan.

And a short while later they called her, pretending to be the bank.

Not realising the scam, Anna told them she had not taken out a loan.

“They gave me the sort code and bank account number I needed to pay back the loan, and said if I paid the £9,000 there wouldn’t be any charges.

“But then I was still feeling suspicious, so I Googled the sort code, and it came up with a completely different bank.”

So, Anna called her bank directly and realised the scammers had returned.

“I didn’t lose any money but it did feel like a real burglary to be honest,” she said.

She closed her account, and changed her email address and mobile number. But she still does not feel safe.

Email attack
Charities are also common targets.

One in three charities suffered a cyber-attack during the first 10 months of the pandemic, according to Ecclesiastical Insurance.

One victim actually specialises in offering cyber-security advice to others.

Hackers got inside Charity Digital’s network for seven days without being detected. They compromised its email accounts and sent false invoices to clients.

The organisation’s chief executive, Jonathan Chevallie, told the BBC the breach had not been noticed in part because all his staff had been working from home.

Charity Digital spent more than £10,000 investigating the attack and has produced an online webinar to help others avoid a similar fate.

Fake tech support
Another popular type of cyber-fraud involved romance scams, in which people looking for relationships via the net often get fooled into sending money to prospective partners, who prey on their emotions.

This type of crime was 20% more common over the past year than the one before.

City of London Police also said key workers had also been specifically targeted.

In one case, a man was arrested on suspicion of using social media to advertise bogus car insurance policies to NHS workers.

The pandemic appears, however, to have coincided with a fall in one type of cyber-crime.

Reported cases of computer software service fraud – in which criminals call offering fake tech support to fool victims into sharing their payment card details and other credentials – dropped by 15.5%.

Nasa has carried out a successful test on part of the most powerful rocket in existence – the Space Launch System (SLS).

Engines on the rocket’s “core stage” were kept running for more than eight minutes – simulating the time it takes the SLS to go from the ground to space.

It’s the second such test for the biggest segment of the SLS, after an attempt in January shut down early.

The SLS is to send humans to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972.

The mission is part of Nasa’s Artemis project, launched by the Trump administration in 2017.

The launcher consists of the orange core, with its four powerful RS-25 engines, and two boosters attached to the sides.

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The test at Stennis Space Center, near Bay St Louis, Mississippi, began at 16:37 ET (20:37 GMT). The core was attached to a giant structure called the B-2 test stand.

A massive plume of exhaust expanded from the stand as the engines shook the ground. The cloud was so enormous, it was spotted from space by the Goes-16 satellite.

Although the target was to fire the engines for eight minutes, teams from Nasa and prime contractor Boeing only had to keep them on for 250 seconds (four minutes) in order to gather all the engineering data they needed.

“It was a great day and a great test,” said acting Nasa administrator Steve Jurczyk.

The chair of the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology congratulated Nasa on the successful test. Texas democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson said: “Achieving this significant milestone is a story of tenacity and dedication.”

She added: “Today’s successful test brings us one step closer to returning American astronauts to the Moon in preparation for the human exploration of Mars.”

The core that was part of Thursday’s test will be used for the maiden flight of the SLS – currently scheduled for late 2021.

In the 1960s, the stand tested engines used in the massive Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo astronauts to the Moon.

John Shannon, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the SLS, told me before the first hotfire attempt: “When the engines start and then throttle up, we will do what’s called a gimbal profile at 60 seconds. The engine nozzles move in a pre-programmed set of movements.”

This gimbal movement of the nozzles allows the rocket to be steered during flight.

Nasa’s new ‘megarocket’ set for critical tests
“This is the most heavily instrumented vehicle we will ever fly so we will get a tremendous amount of engineering data on vibration and temperature and stress, acoustics,” said Mr Shannon.

Before Thursday’s hotfire, engineers filled the core stage with more than 700,000 gallons (2.6 million litres) of propellant.

That propellant consisted of liquid hydrogen, which is the rocket’s fuel, and liquid oxygen, which helps the fuel burn. They react explosively inside the engines, generating super-heated water vapour from the exhaust.

When they’re fed to the engines, the propellants are at more than two hundred degrees below zero (F), but the exhaust that emerges is 6,000F (3,316C) – hot enough to boil iron.

Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water were directed into the flame bucket to cool the exhaust. In addition, tens of thousands of gallons were used to create a water “curtain” around the engines to suppress the noise generated when they fire for eight minutes.

This was done to protect the core stage from vibrations while it is anchored to the stand.

The RS-25s, built by California-based Aerojet Rocketdyne, are the same ones that powered the space shuttle.

The engines tested on Thursday contributed to 21 successful shuttle flights over the vehicle’s 30-year operational history.

Two were used on the last space shuttle mission, STS-135 in 2011. One flew on the 1998 mission that launched the oldest person ever to go to space – US senator and Project Mercury astronaut John Glenn, who was 77 at the time. The other was used on one of the flights to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

The engines were refurbished following shuttle missions, but they will be discarded after the maiden flight of the SLS later this year.

That mission, called Artemis-1, will send Nasa’s next-generation crew vehicle, Orion, around the Moon to thoroughly test its systems.

Tom Whitmeyer, from Exploration Systems Development at Nasa, said it would take about a month to refurbish the core stage, after which it would be put on a ship to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare it for launch.

Here, it will be installed on a structure called the mobile launcher between the two booster rockets, completing the SLS vehicle.