Four astronauts blasted off from Florida this morning on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a high\u2011stakes 10-day trip around the moon that marks the United States’ 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, a thunderous ascent leaving behind a towering column of thick white vapor.<\/p>\n
The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts \u200cReid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen are poised for a nearly\u00a010-day expedition\u00a0around the moon and back, taking them deeper into space than humans have ever gone.<\/p>\n
After nearly three years of training, they are the first group to fly in NASA’s\u00a0Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar series of missions created in 2017 to build up a long-term US presence on the moon over the next decade and beyond.<\/p>\n
The launch was a\u00a0major milestone\u00a0more than a decade in the making for the US space agency’s SLS rocket, handing its core contractors Boeing\u00a0BA.N\u00a0and Northrop Grumman\u00a0NOC.N\u00a0long-sought validation that the 30-story-tall system can safely loft humans into space, as NASA increasingly relies on newer, cheaper rockets from\u00a0Elon Musk’s\u00a0SpaceX and others.<\/p>\n
The crew’s gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, built for NASA by Lockheed Martin\u00a0LMT.N, will separate from the SLS upper stage 3-1\/2 hours into flight in Earth’s orbit. The crew will then take manual control of Orion to test its steering and maneuverability around the detached upper stage, attempting the first of dozens of test objectives planned throughout the mission.<\/p>\n
The Artemis II mission is a key early step in the flagship US moon program, 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 program with a planned astronaut landing as soon as 2030.<\/p>\n
The astronauts had arrived in Florida from Houston on Friday.<\/p>\n
They awoke on Wednesday about nine hours before launch for breakfast, a weather briefing and pre-mission preparations, before sharing farewell words with family ahead of their 2pm drive to the launchpad, escorted by armored vehicles.<\/p>\n
They have been in a\u00a0two-week quarantine\u00a0leading up to liftoff and spent time with their families over the weekend at the Kennedy Space Center’s beach house, a spot where astronauts rest before blasting off into space.<\/p>\n
NASA on Wednesday morning started filling the SLS core stage with 2,774,706 litres\u00a0of super-cooled propellant that powers the rocket’s four RS-25 engines. The pickup truck-sized engines, built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, had powered NASA’s Space Shuttle for decades.<\/p>\n
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