Historic Artemis II launch sends astronauts bound for the moon

The first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo programme ended in 1972 is on its way. The Artemis II mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 1 April, and if all goes well, the four astronauts aboard will soon fly further than any humans have ever been from Earth.

This marks 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 was for the uncrewed Artemis I mission, which took a loop around the moon similar to the trajectory that is planned for Artemis II.

Now that the rocket is launched, the 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 performing tests on the spacecraft itself. The most involved of these tests will be piloting Orion to dock with an older craft in orbit. For most of the flight and future flights, the capsule will steer itself autonomously, but for the docking procedure, the astronauts will be in control.

“You’re not always going to manually dock, but you may need to manually stop a docking that’s not going well,” Glover said in a 29 March press conference. “Even if we don’t do the operation by hand (in the future), we need to be able to stop it.”

After that, Orion will travel in a loop around the moon. At its most distant, it will be about 402,000 kilometres from Earth, beating the record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. It will get as close as 6513 kilometres from the lunar surface, allowing the astronauts to see parts of the moon that have never been seen by human eyes before because of the light conditions during the Apollo flights.

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The mission will last about 10 days in total before the Orion capsule returns to Earth. If everything goes smoothly, the next mission, Artemis III, will be in 2027. Until recently, that was intended to be a lunar landing, but it will now remain in orbit around Earth to test the docking system with the lunar lander or landers that will finally carry astronauts to the moon’s surface. This is now planned to happen in the Artemis IV mission in 2028.

“Our motto from day one has been ‘Help Artemis III succeed’,” said Wiseman in the press conference. All of these missions together are in preparation for a permanent moon base, which NASA officials hope will enable a sustained human presence on the moon for decades to come.

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