After weeks of delays, NASA finally launched a historic flight Wednesday to send a crew of four astronauts on a trailblazing nine-day trip around the moon and back. The Artemis II mission — with commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, astronaut Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — lifted off at 6:35 p.m. EDT.
It wasn’t exactly a smooth ride to the launch pad, either. The mission was originally planned for early February, but it slipped first because of hydrogen fuel leaks and then later due to problems with the upper stage propellant pressurization system. NASA says both issues have been resolved, clearing the way for blastoff.
At the Kennedy Space Center, Wiseman had a line ready for the moment, basically a grin with a mission statement. “Hey, let’s go to the moon!” he exclaimed to a throng of reporters after arriving Friday, adding that he thinks the nation and the world has been waiting a long time to do this again. You could almost hear the buzz in the hangar—metal and machinery everywhere, and that low, constant roar of systems running as the countdown crept forward.
Artemis II is a test mission, and it leans hard into “firsts.” This marks the first crewed flight atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful operational booster in the world, and only its second flight overall. It will also be the first piloted flight of an Orion deep space crew capsule, with a major objective to put the crew ship—named Integrity—through its paces. “This is a test mission,” Wiseman said. “When we get off the planet, we might come right back home… We might go to the moon. That’s where we want to go, but it is a test mission.”
There’s also a bigger-than-one-mission context sitting behind the technical checklists. This crewed flyby is the first step in a wider push that NASA hopes will keep pace with China’s plan to put its own “taikonauts” on the lunar surface by 2030. NASA is aiming to launch one and possibly two Artemis moon landing missions in 2028, but first it wants Orion tested thoroughly during this Artemis II voyage.
Then comes the follow-on rhythm: next year, NASA plans for astronauts to rendezvous and dock in low-Earth orbit with new moon landers being built by SpaceX and Blue Origin to test critical systems and verify operating procedures. After that, NASA astronauts will embark on a moon landing near the lunar south pole in just two years. In the meantime, NASA will be focusing on increasing the flight rate and designing a moon base where astronauts can spend weeks or months at a time carrying out research and technology development. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who announced the updated plans in February with an estimated cost of $20 billion over seven years, described the strategy as a “step-by-step approach,” saying it is “exactly how NASA achieved the near impossible” with the Apollo program.
Once Artemis II is in space, the mission starts looking like an exam made of burns, switches, and careful timing. Two rocket firings—one 50 minutes after liftoff and another about an hour later—set the spacecraft on an elliptical orbit with a high point of 43,760 miles, higher than any astronauts have flown since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972. The Orion capsule then separated from the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS, about three hours and 23 minutes after launch. The crew gets a 24-hour-long orbit to verify communications, navigation, propulsion and life support systems before heading to the moon. That includes “waste collection,” which is NASA’s phrase for what happens in the capsule’s cramped toilet compartment.
Assuming everything looks right after engineers review data from the first day in space, the crew will prepare for the critical trans-lunar injection, or TLI, burn about 25 hours after launch, using the service module’s engine. The six-minute five-second firing boosts the ship’s velocity by about 900 mph and begins the four-day coast to the moon. The flight then follows a “free return” trajectory, looping around the leading edge of the moon and using lunar gravity to bend the ship’s path back toward Earth. In other words—if Orion’s navigation or propulsion has trouble once they’re headed out—the capsule is still designed to come home.
The return itself is where the mission gets especially intense. If all goes to plan, reentry and splashdown land on Friday, April 10. The Orion crew capsule will be moving around 25,000 mph—about 7 miles per second—when it hits the discernible atmosphere about 75 miles above the Pacific Ocean, and its 16.5-foot-wide heat shield will endure temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees. The sequence is brief and unforgiving: radio signals will be blocked for about five minutes, then parachutes will deploy over the final stretch.
As one more layer of reassurance, the heat shield used on Artemis II is the same type used on the unpiloted Artemis I flight in 2022, but NASA managers deemed it safe to fly again “as is,” using a different reentry trajectory that will prevent the internal heating that caused the Artemis I problem. Engineers determined that high entry heating had made Artemis I’s outer “char” layer permeable, allowing gases from lower layers to escape through pyrolysis—pressure built up during a long “skip” trajectory and pushed chunks of the heat shield away. For Artemis II, the free return path means NASA believes it can “safely, and with high degrees of success, control that entry environment,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator.
Finally, after splashdown and recovery, the crew will be helped out of the capsule and airlifted by helicopter to a waiting Navy amphibious transport dock for initial medical checks and calls to family and friends. The capsule itself will be hauled into the recovery ship’s flooded “well deck” and secured for the trip back. Engineers will spend weeks reviewing data from the Artemis II flight—while, already, planning for the next step, which is… well, there’s a lot more to build.
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