The Artemis II mission rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday evening, carrying four astronauts on a crewed trip toward the moon—the first time humans have traveled that far since 1972.
Tens of thousands of spectators gathered on Cocoa Beach Pier and nearby beaches and roads to watch the 32-story Space Launch System rocket climb into a clear sky, evoking memories of the Apollo launches of the 1960s and ’70s.
Artemis II will test the crewed Orion spacecraft, with astronauts periodically taking manual control during the flight around the moon and back. The mission crew includes NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They arrived in Florida from Houston after a two-week prelaunch quarantine.
This mission is the second in NASA’s Artemis program; Artemis I sent an uncrewed Orion to lunar orbit and back in 2022. Under Artemis, NASA aims to conduct progressively more challenging missions to explore the moon for science and to establish capabilities that could support the first crewed missions to Mars. The agency hopes to achieve a crewed moon landing near the lunar south pole around 2028, with eventual plans to move toward Mars in the 2030s or 2040s.
NASA led development of the Space Launch System and the Orion capsule, and has contracted private firms including SpaceX and Blue Origin to provide lunar landers for future Artemis missions. On Artemis II, launch and spacecraft systems will be exercised in an operational crewed context: testing life-support systems, crew interfaces, communications, and the Orion’s handling as astronauts fly parts of the mission manually.
A critical component of Orion—the European Service Module (ESM)—was built by Airbus in Bremen, Germany, for the European Space Agency. The ESM supplies propulsion, electrical power, thermal control, water and oxygen for the crew, and uses 33 engines including a repurposed Shuttle orbital maneuvering engine.
The Artemis II test flight is planned to last about 10 days and will carry the crew roughly 252,000 miles (406,000 km) from Earth, the farthest any humans have traveled. This mission will not include a lunar landing; instead it serves as a key test and stepping stone toward establishing sustained human presence on the moon. Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru, Alex Berry