![\"Canadian](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/002427d3-614.jpg\"\/)
\nThe Artemis II crew<\/p>\n
Four astronauts have blasted off from Florida on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a high-stakes 10-day trip around the Moon.<\/p>\n
It marks the United \u2060States’ boldest step yet toward returning humans to the lunar surface this decade before China’s first crewed landing.<\/p>\n
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, topped with its Orion crew capsule, roared to life just before sunset at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center to lift its first crew of three US astronauts and a Canadian astronaut off Earth.<\/p>\n
The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy \u200cHansen are poised for an expedition around the Moon and back, taking them deeper into space than humans have ever gone.<\/p>\n
Watch: NASA’s Artemis II blasts off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center<\/p>\n
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The journey marks a series of historic accomplishments: it will send the first person of colour, the first woman and the first non-American on a lunar mission.<\/p>\n
Their approximately 10-day mission will see them hurtle around Earth’s natural satellite without landing, much like Apollo 8 did in 1968.<\/p>\n
If the mission proceeds as planned, the astronauts will set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before.<\/p>\n
After nearly three years of training, they are the first group to fly in NASA’s Artemis programme, a multibillion dollar series of missions created in 2017 to build up a long-term US presence on the Moon over the next decade \u200cand beyond.<\/p>\n
The launch was a major milestone more than a decade in the making for the US space agency’s SLS rocket, handing its \u2060core contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman long-sought validation that the 30-story-tall system can safely take humans into \u200cspace, as NASA increasingly relies on newer, cheaper rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX \u2060and others.<\/p>\n
\nThe Artemis II crew<\/p>\n
The \u200ccrew’s Orion capsule, built for NASA by Lockheed Martin, will separate from the SLS upper stage three-and-a-half hours into flight in Earth’s orbit.<\/p>\n
The crew will then take manual control of Orion to test its steering and maneuverability around \u2060the detached upper stage, attempting the first of dozens of test objectives planned throughout the mission.<\/p>\n
The mission was originally due to launch as early as February.<\/p>\n
But repeated setbacks stalled the mission and even necessitated rolling the rocket back to its hangar for analysis and repairs.<\/p>\n
The Artemis II \u2060mission is a key early step in the flagship US moon programme, which is targeting its first crewed landing on the lunar surface in 2028 in the Artemis IV mission.<\/p>\n
NASA is pressed to achieve that lunar landing – its first since the final Apollo mission in 1972 – as China expands its own lunar programme with a planned astronaut landing as soon as 2030.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four astronauts have blasted off from Florida on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a high-stakes 10-day trip around the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-377363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}