The historic launch of Artemis II will send astronauts on their way to the moon

The first manned mission to the moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972 is on its way. The Artemis II mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1, and if all goes well, the four astronauts on board will soon be flying farther than humans have ever gone from Earth.

This is only the second flight for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and its Orion crew capsule, and its first crewed flight. The previous launch in 2022 involved an unmanned Artemis I mission that circled the moon on a similar trajectory to that planned for Artemis II.

Now that the rocket is launched, NASA crew members Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will spend the first two days of their mission orbiting Earth and conducting tests on the spacecraft itself. The most common of these tests will be piloting Orion to dock with an older craft in orbit. For most flights and future flights, the capsule will drive autonomously, but the docking procedure will be controlled by astronauts.

“You’re not always going to dock manually, but you may need to manually stop a dock that’s not working well,” Glover said at a March 29 press conference. “Although we don’t do the operation manually. [in the future]we have to be able to stop it.”

After that, Orion will travel in a loop around the moon. The furthest will be about 402,000 kilometers from Earth, surpassing the record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. It will come up to 6,513 kilometers from the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to see parts of the moon that human eyes have never seen before due to the lighting conditions during the Apollo flights.

The mission will last about 10 days in total before the Orion capsule returns to Earth. If all goes well, the next mission, Artemis III, will be in 2027. Until recently, it was supposed to land on the moon, but now it will remain in orbit around Earth to test the docking system with the lunar lander or landers that will eventually carry astronauts to the surface of the moon. This is now planned to happen in the Artemis IV mission in 2028.

“Our motto from day one has been ‘Help Artemis III succeed,'” Wiseman said at a news conference. All of these missions together are in preparation for a permanent lunar base that NASA officials hope will enable a permanent human presence on the moon for decades.

“It is our strong hope that this mission is the beginning of an era where everyone, every person on Earth can look at the moon and see it as a destination as well. [rather than some distant rock in the sky]Koch said.

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