Artemis II mission launches from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida
AFP via Getty Images
The first manned mission to the Moon is on its way since the Apollo program ended in 1972. The Artemis II mission launches April 1 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and if all goes well, the four astronauts aboard will soon fly further than any humans have ever flown beyond Earth.
This is only the second flight of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and its Orion crew capsule, and its first crewed flight. The previous launch in 2022 was for the unmanned Artemis I mission, which took a loop around the moon similar to the trajectory planned for Artemis II.
Now that the rocket has launched, NASA crew members Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will spend the first two days of their mission orbiting Earth and conducting tests on the spacecraft. The most involved of these tests would be to pilot Orion to dock with an older spacecraft in orbit. For most of the flight and future flights, the capsule itself will operate autonomously, but for the docking process, astronauts will be in control.
“You won’t always be manually docking, but you may need to manually stop a docking that’s not going properly,” Glover said at a March 29 press conference. “Even if we don’t do hand operations (in the future), we need to be able to prevent it.”
After that, Orion will travel in a loop around the moon. At its greatest distance, it will be about 402,000 kilometers from Earth, breaking the record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. It will be as close as 6513 kilometers from the lunar surface, allowing astronauts to see parts of the Moon that were never seen before by human eyes due to lighting conditions during the Apollo flights.
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 take place in 2027. Until recently, its purpose was lunar landing, but now it will remain in orbit around Earth to test a lunar lander or a docking system with landers that will eventually carry astronauts to the surface of the Moon. It is now planned to do this in the Artemis IV mission in 2028.
“Our motto from day one has been ‘Help Artemis III succeed,'” said Wiseman at the press conference. Together, these missions are preparing a permanent moon base that NASA officials hope will ensure a sustained human presence on the Moon for decades to come.
Koch said, “We sincerely hope that this mission marks the beginning of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the Moon and also see it as a destination (rather than some distant rock in the sky).
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