For the first time in more than 53 years, humans have begun a journey to the Moon.
NASA’s long-delayed Artemis II mission began at 6:35:12 p.m. Eastern Wednesday with the liftoff of the Space Launch System rocket from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39B. This was only the second flight of SLS, 3.5 years after a successful debut in November 2022 that sent an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a flyby around the Moon.
Aboard Orion this time for another lunar flyby: an international crew of commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Christina Koch, all NASA astronauts, and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen.
SLS delivered the Orion capsule and its European Space Agency-built service module to an initial orbit about 8 minutes after sprinting into a clear blue sky above Florida’s Space Coast on the power of 8.8 million pounds of thrust.
“We have a beautiful moonrise, and we’re headed right at it,” Wiseman said about halfway to orbit aboard the capsule that the crew christened Integrity.
After reaching orbit, Orion deployed its four solar arrays–angled away from the spacecraft in a way that evokes an X-Wing from Star Wars–while flight controllers worked through a brief communications glitch.
Later Wednesday, the SLS upper stage sent Integrity into a high Earth orbit ranging as far as 46,000 miles away, treating the crew to the sight of a lunar eclipse along the way.
“It was an amazing ride uphill,” Wiseman said during a broadcast from Integrity Wednesday night. “We forgot how beautiful it is to look down on Earth.”
If everything checks out, the service module’s main engine will fire Thursday evening to send the crew on a trajectory that will loop them around the Moon.
A large fraction of the people reading this post were not yet born when people last journeyed that far from Earth. Apollo 17 launched on Dec. 7, 1972 and, after a three-day expedition on the Moon, ended with a splashdown on Dec. 19.
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Following its lunar flyby, Artemis II returns to Earth for a splashdown scheduled for April 10.
The Moon is up and to the right. (Credit: Joel Kowsky/NASA)
This flight has been a long time coming. In 2011, NASA once projected that SLS would first fly by at the end of 2017. But despite being designed from a parts bin including main engines and solid rocket boosters from the space shuttles that NASA retired in 2011, an upper stage adapted from also-retired Delta cargo rocket, and a service module engine derived from the shuttle’s Orbital Maneuvering System engines, this Boeing-built rocket ran into years of delay and billions of dollars in cost overruns.
After SLS first flew without a crew in 2022, NASA had to wrestle with unexpected damage seen on the heat shield at the bottom of that Orion capsule.
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Following a second review ordered up by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman–a payments billionaire turned private astronaut who has flown to space twice on SpaceX Dragon capsules–the space agency confirmed plans to have Artemis II fly a steeper trajectory into the Earth’s atmosphere to limit peak exposure.
Actually landing on the Moon awaits much more work. NASA needs a spacecraft that can take astronauts back to the lunar surface before Chinese astronauts can land there for the first time, which that country’s space agency has been advancing plans to do before 2030.
When NASA named an initial contingent of Artemis astronauts in 2020, it projected the first crewed landing for 2024. But NASA’s 2021 award of a $2.89 billion contract to SpaceX to develop a Human Landing System from the upper stage of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket has run afoul of Starship’s own development delays. Almost three years after its first launch, it has yet to reach orbit.
In 2023, NASA awarded Blue Origin a separate, $3.4 billion contract to develop a smaller lander (but still much bigger than the Lunar Module that took pairs of Apollo astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back) for later Artemis landings.
Last fall, NASA invited both SpaceX and Blue Origin to propose alternative designs that would allow lunar landings sooner. Isaacman has since moved to shake up Artemis further, directing NASA to adapt an already-flying upper stage for a planned upgrade to SLS instead of having a new design built. A week ago, the administrator also moved to scrap plans to build a lunar space station called Gateway in favor of developing a base on the Moon’s surface.
That’s an ambitious agenda. But first, NASA needs to get four astronauts around the Moon and back to Earth.
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