NASA launches Artemis II, its first crewed moon mission in half a century

Cape Canaveral, Florida: Four astronauts blasted off from Florida on Wednesday (US time) on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a high-stakes voyage around the moon that marks the United States’ boldest step yet toward returning humans to the lunar surface later this decade in a race with China.

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 Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying its debut crew – three Americans and a Canadian – into Earth orbit. The 32-storey space vehicle thundered into clear skies, trailing a towering column of thick, white vapour.

Crowds jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 60s and 70s.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the launch was an opening act for subsequent missions that would include construction of a moon base to support the “enduring presence we’re trying to create on the surface”.

If the mission proceeds as planned, the crew consisting of NASA astronauts ‌Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will fly around the moon and back in their nearly 10-day expedition, putting the spacecraft through its paces while venturing deeper into space than humans have ever gone.

The mission is the debut crewed test flight in the Artemis program, successor to NASA’s Cold War-era Apollo project, and the world’s first to send astronauts in the vicinity of the moon, out of Earth’s orbit, in 53 years.

It serves as a crucial dress rehearsal for a NASA bid to land humans on the lunar surface later this decade, after one more crewed mission around the moon.

NASA is targeting 2028 for Artemis IV, a first-ever landing of astronauts on the moon’s South Pole, seeking to beat China’s planned crewed mission to the same lunar region as early as 2030.

The last time astronauts walked on the moon – a feat so far achieved only by the United States – was the final Apollo mission in 1972. “I’m cheering you on,” said Charlie Duke, one of only four surviving moonwalkers, in a note to Wiseman and his crew before their flight.

‘For all humanity’

After nearly three years of training, the crew is the first to fly in NASA’s Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar venture established in 2017 to build up a long-term US presence on the moon over the next decade and beyond, serving as a stepping stone to eventual missions to Mars.

Minutes before lift-off, Hansen, strapped inside the gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, told mission control in Houston: “This is Jeremy, we are going for all humanity.”

Launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said: “Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy, on this historic mission, you take with you the heart of this Artemis team, the daring spirit of the American people and our partners across the globe, and the hopes and dreams of a new generation.”

“Good luck, godspeed, Artemis II. Let’s go,” she added.

Five minutes into the flight, Wiseman, the mission’s commander, saw the team’s target: “We have a beautiful moonrise, we’re headed right at it,” he said from the capsule.

A few hours after lift-off, the SLS rocket’s upper stage successfully separated from the Lockheed Martin-made Orion capsule and its propulsion module. The lunar crew – the most diverse ever, with the first woman, person of colour and non-US citizen – then began work on an early test objective: manually steering the spacecraft around the upper stage to demonstrate its manoeuvrability, should its default automated controls ever fail.

The astronauts will stick close to home for the first 25 hours of their test flight, checking out the capsule in orbit around Earth before firing the main engine that will propel them to the moon.

They won’t pause for a stopover or orbit the moon like Apollo 8’s first lunar visitors did so famously on Christmas Eve 1968, reading from Genesis. But they stand to become the most distant humans ever when their capsule zooms past the moon and continues another 6400 kilometres beyond, before making a U-turn and tearing straight home to a splashdown in the Pacific.

During their lunar fly-by, the moon will appear to be the size of a basketball held at arm’s length. The astronauts will take turns peering through Orion’s windows with cameras. If the lighting is right, they should see features never before viewed through human eyes. They’ll also catch snippets of a total solar eclipse, donning eclipse glasses as the moon briefly blocks the sun from their perspective and the corona is revealed.

Major milestone

Wednesday’s launch was a major milestone more than a decade in the making for the US space agency’s SLS rocket, handing its principal contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman long-sought validation that the launch system was ready to safely loft humans into space.

NASA has increasingly relied on newer, cheaper rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to send astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

The success of the Artemis II flight so far provided positive talking points for a space agency that lost roughly 20 per cent of its workforce under the Trump administration’s federal downsizing efforts last year.

“It’s amazing,” US President Donald Trump said of the launch during a national address about the Iran war. “They are on their way and God bless them, these are brave people. God bless those four unbelievable astronauts.”

Farthest trip in history

The Artemis II mission will send its four-person crew some 406,000km into space – the farthest humans have ever travelled.

The current record for the farthest spaceflight at roughly 399,000km is held by the three-man crew of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, which was beset by technical problems after an oxygen tank exploded and was unable to land on the moon as planned.

NASA launched its first Artemis mission without crew in 2022, sending the Orion spacecraft on a similar path around the moon and back.

Artemis II will pose a greater test of Orion as well as the SLS rocket, a program partly known for its ballooning costs at an estimated $US2 billion ($2.9 billion) to $US4 billion per launch.

The danger is right up there for Artemis II. NASA has refused to release its risk assessment for the mission. Managers contend it’s better than 50:50 – the usual odds for a new rocket – but how much more is murky.

The SLS rocket leaked flammable hydrogen fuel during ground tests, a recurring problem that engineers still do not completely understand.

Other issues NASA had to deal with before the launch included one related to commands not getting through to the rocket’s flight-termination system, which is needed to send a self-destruct signal in case the rocket veers off course and threatens populated areas.

That issue was quickly resolved, according to NASA. It also had to troubleshoot one of the batteries in the capsule’s launch-abort system. Launch controllers scrambled to understand why the battery’s temperature was out of limits. Ultimately, it didn’t prevent the launch from taking place.

Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to develop the landers that NASA will use to put its astronauts on the lunar surface. Artemis III had been set to be the agency’s first astronaut moon landing, but Isaacman in February added an extra test mission before the landing.

Reuters, AP

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