READING, Pa. – Step inside the planetarium at the Reading Public Museum and look up. Tonight, that dome turns into a live view of a mission years in the making.<\/p>\n
\u201cFinally, it’s the launch of Artemis 2, scheduled to happen around 6:24 this afternoon,\u201d said Mark Mazurkiewicz, director of the planetarium.<\/p>\n
Mazurkiewicz says Artemis II will send four astronauts around the moon on a ten-day mission. The launch window is between 6:24 and 8:24 p.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe biggest factor is always the weather. I think they’re tracking a small storm off of the west coast of Florida right now. They don’t expect it to be a major storm, but there’s a 20% chance they may have to cancel the launch today,\u201d Mazurkiewicz said.<\/p>\n
But if everything goes as planned, history will be made again.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be the farthest we’ve ever sent a live human being, ever. When we first went to the moon back in the late 60s and the early 70s, we basically just went to the moon, came back. Because of the nature of this, we’re going to be wrapping around the moon in kind of like a weird figure-eight formation. They’ll make a couple of passes, then come back to Earth,\u201d Mazurkiewicz said.<\/p>\n
And here in Reading, people get to watch it together.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s nice to do it in the planetarium, in the big dome, and when you have a whole bunch of, like, 100-plus people in there with the same mentality, very amped and juiced about getting up in outer space,\u201d Mazurkiewicz added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, Pa. – Step inside the planetarium at the Reading Public Museum and look up. Tonight, that dome…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[70186,70189,70188,28,70187,736,128,130,129,5048],"class_list":["post-154769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-artemis-ii","tag-artemis-program","tag-mark-mazurkiewicz","tag-pennsylvania","tag-planetarium","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-reading-public-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}