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data-caption=”The Artemis II mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida”
data-credit=”AFP via Getty Images”>
The Artemis II mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida
AFP via Getty Images
The Artemis II mission, marking the first crewed journey to the moon since the conclusion of the Apollo program in 1972, has successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on April 1. If all proceeds as planned, the four astronauts aboard will soon venture further from Earth than any humans have before.
This mission represents the second flight for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and the Orion crew capsule, but it’s the first with a crew. The Artemis I mission, launched in 2022, was uncrewed and followed a similar trajectory around the moon, which Artemis II is set to replicate.
Following the launch, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will spend the initial two days in Earth’s orbit testing the spacecraft. A key part of these assessments will involve manually piloting Orion to dock with an older spacecraft in orbit. While the capsule is designed to operate autonomously for most of the journey, the astronauts will take control for docking procedures.
“You’re not always going to manually dock, but you may need to manually stop a docking that’s not going well,” Glover explained during a press conference on March 29. “Even if we don’t do the operation by hand [in the future], we need to be able to stop it.”
After completing these tests, Orion will proceed on a lunar loop. At its furthest point, it will be approximately 402,000 kilometers from Earth, surpassing the distance achieved by the Apollo 13 mission in 1970. The spacecraft will approach within 6513 kilometers of the moon’s surface, offering astronauts views of moon regions previously unseen by human eyes, owing to the light conditions during the Apollo missions.
The entire mission is expected to last around 10 days before the Orion capsule returns to Earth. Should this mission prove successful, the subsequent mission, Artemis III, is slated for 2027. Although initially intended for a lunar landing, Artemis III will now remain in Earth’s orbit to test the docking system with the lunar lander(s) set to transport astronauts to the moon’s surface in the Artemis IV mission in 2028.
“Our motto from day one has been ‘Help Artemis III succeed’,” Wiseman stated during the press conference. These missions are part of a broader effort to establish a permanent moon base, which NASA aims to use to sustain human presence on the moon for many years.
“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],” Koch remarked.
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