NASA's 327-foot Ares I-X test rocket, which was Tuesday hauled to the revamped launch pad at the Kennedy Space Centre, will undertake its test flight on October 27, even as a final report about the agency's moon mission is yet to be submitted by the White House expert panel.

The demonstrator rocket, set to embark on a $360 million test flight, is nearly the almost the same shape, size, and weight as the Ares I rocket that NASA intends to use for the prospective launch of its new, manned Orion spaceship some day in the future.

However, with a number of critics questioning NASA's moon program, and the review panel report still to come, it is quite likely that Ares 1 may either be altered considerably or canceled altogether.

Commenting on the money-worth of the scheduled financially-gigantic test flight, veteran aerospace engineer, analyst and writer Rand Simberg remarked recently that though the project cannot be said to have zero value, it is definitely not worth the money being spent on it

Nonetheless, with NASA reiterating that the test flight is crucial, mission manager Bob Ess said: "It's been a long time since NASA built a new vehicle. The whole purpose of this test is to get information so we understand and can correlate our computer models. From that, we learn how to use that data for the next launch vehicle."