NASA launched its historic Artemis 2 mission Wednesday evening, sending four astronauts beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in more than 53 years on a nine-day mission to fly around the Moon and back.
Liftoff occurred at 6:24 p.m. EDT from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, with NASA astronaut and mission commander Reid Wiseman leading the quartet that includes fellow NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
The flight marks the first crewed flight of the Orion spacecraft, serving as a key stepping stone for grand plans of a Moon Base and eventually human exploration on Mars.
Today (April 2), the crew will conduct critical tests in Earth orbit before heading toward the moon Thursday evening.
The big decision point will come Thursday when NASA makes the call on whether the spacecraft and crew are ready to commit to their journey to the Moon, with the main engine firing for the trans-lunar injection burn less than two hours into Flight Day 2.
Once aboard their spacecraft named ‘Integrity,’ the astronauts will call home a habitable volume of 330 cubic feet, which NASA compared to the combination of two small minivans.
The four astronauts will spend more than nine days aboard their Orion spacecraft and are poised to pass the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.
At the conclusion of a two-day flight readiness review, “all the teams polled ‘go’ to launch and fly Artemis 2 around the moon, pending completion of some of the work before we roll out to the launch pad,” said Lori Glaze, associate administrator of Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters.
The mission represents a crucial test of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule before future Artemis missions attempt to land astronauts on the lunar surface later this decade.