NASA blasts off to the moon with first crew in decades
Joey Roulette
Cape Canaveral, Florida: Four astronauts set off from Florida for NASA’s Artemis II mission; it’s a 10-day, high-risk trip around the moon that marks the United States’ boldest step yet to return humans to the lunar surface in a decade before China’s first crewed landing.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket equipped with the Orion crew capsule roared to life at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center just before sunset (Florida time) on Wednesday to lift its first crew of three U.S. astronauts and one Canadian astronaut from Earth; a thunderous rise that leaves behind a rising column of thick white vapor.
The Artemis II crew, including NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are preparing for a nearly 10-day expedition around and beyond the moon, taking them deeper into space than humans have ever gone before.
After nearly three years of training, they became the first group to fly in NASA’s Artemis program, a series of multibillion-dollar missions created in 2017 with the goal of establishing a long-term U.S. presence on the moon over the next decade and beyond.
The launch was a major milestone more than a decade in the making of the U.S. space agency’s SLS rocket, providing long-sought confirmation to prime contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman that the 30-story system can safely lift humans into space as NASA increasingly relies on newer, cheaper rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others.
The crew’s gum-shaped Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin for NASA, will separate from the SLS upper stage three and a half hours into the flight in Earth orbit. The crew will then take manual control of Orion, testing its steering and maneuverability around the self-contained upper stage, attempting the first of dozens of test targets planned throughout the mission.
The Artemis II mission is an important early step in the United States’ flagship lunar program, which aims for the first crewed landing on the lunar surface in 2028 as part of the Artemis IV mission.
As China expands its own lunar program with a planned astronaut landing as soon as 2030, NASA is under pressure to carry out this lunar landing, its first since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
Reuters
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