NASA launches Artemis II mission rocket from Florida

A new chapter in humanity’s return to deep space began in Florida, where four astronauts launched on NASA’s Artemis II mission for a high-stakes, nearly ten-day journey around the Moon.

The flight represents the United ⁠States’ clearest move yet toward putting humans back on the lunar surface this decade, with NASA aiming to get there before China mounts its first crewed landing.

Just before sunset local time at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket thundered off the pad with the Orion crew capsule on top, carrying its first human crew: three US astronauts and one Canadian astronaut.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described the launch as the opening step in a broader campaign that would eventually include building a Moon base to support the “enduring presence we’re trying to create on the surface”.

If all goes according to plan, the crew — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — will loop around the Moon and return to Earth on an expedition lasting nearly 10 days, testing the spacecraft while travelling farther into space than any humans before them.

The mission is the first crewed test flight of the Artemis programme, NASA’s successor to the Apollo project of the Cold War era.

It is also the first mission in 53 years to send astronauts into the Moon’s vicinity and beyond Earth orbit.

For NASA, the flight is a pivotal rehearsal for its effort to land ‌humans on the lunar surface later this decade, after one more crewed ⁠mission around the Moon.

The agency is targeting 2028 for Artemis IV, which would mark the first astronaut landing at the moon’s South Pole, as NASA seeks to get there ahead of China’s planned crewed mission to the same region as early as 2030.

The most recent time astronauts walked on the moon — an achievement still accomplished only by the United States — was during the final Apollo mission in 1972.

Following nearly three years of training, this crew becomes the first to fly under NASA’s Artemis programme, a multibillion-dollar effort created in 2017 to establish a sustained US presence on the Moon in the coming decade and beyond, while laying groundwork for eventual missions to Mars.

Minutes before launch, the Canadian astronaut, strapped inside the 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.”

A few hours after lift-off, the SLS rocket’s upper stage separated successfully from the Orion capsule and its propulsion module, both built by Lockheed Martin.

The crew then ‌turned to an early test objective, manually flying the spacecraft around the upper stage to prove it could be manoeuvred if its automated controls were ever to fail.

The Artemis II crew ahead of blast off

The launch ⁠marked a watershed moment in a project more ‌than a decade in development for NASA’s SLS rocket, giving principal contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman the validation they had long sought that the vehicle could safely carry humans into space.

In recent years, NASA has leaned more heavily on newer and less expensive rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other companies to transport astronauts to low-Earth orbit.

The mission’s early success also offered a welcome boost for the agency, which lost roughly 20%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,” he added.

Artemis II ⁠is expected to carry its four-person crew about 406,000km into space — farther than humans have ever gone.

The existing record for the most distant human spaceflight, at about 248,000 miles, belongs to the three-man crew of Apollo 13 in 1970, a mission crippled by technical trouble after an oxygen tank exploded and prevented a planned Moon landing.

NASA’s first Artemis mission launched without a crew in2022, sending the Orion spacecraft on a comparable route around the moon and back.

Artemis II will subject both Orion and the SLS rocket to a sterner test. The programme has also drawn scrutiny for rising costs estimated at between $2 billion and $4 billion per launch.

At the same time, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are competing to develop the lunar landers NASA plans to use to place astronauts on the Moon’s surface.

Artemis III had previously been slated as the agency’s ‌first astronaut landing on the Moon, but new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman added another test mission in February before any landing attempt.