KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and a Canadian soared into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, riding the most powerful rocket ever crewed, on the opening leg of a nine-day trip around the Moon.
Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the quartet climbed away from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC).
Four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and a pair of solid rocket boosters ignited to lift the nearly 6 million-pound vehicle off its pad at Launch Complex 39B. Together the engines and boosters produced about 8.8 million pounds of thrust, exceeding the power of NASA’s Saturn V used during the Apollo era.
Moments later, waves of sound rolled toward onlookers several miles away as the rocket roared upward, trailing a brilliant plume of fire and smoke.
Commander Reid Wiseman, a 50-year-old Navy captain and former test pilot, delivered calm radio reports from the Orion spacecraft’s cockpit perched atop the SLS. He was accompanied by pilot Victor Glover (also a Navy captain), mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
In the limelight
The launch of Artemis II represents a significant milestone for NASA. The agency has poured nearly $100 billion into components of the Artemis program over the past 20 years and now finds itself racing against China to return people to the lunar surface. The mission is historic: humans last left the Moon in 1972 and have not been back since.
This flight will not touch down on the Moon; a landing is slated for a later mission, currently planned as Artemis IV in 2028. NASA is collaborating with SpaceX and Blue Origin to create crewed landers to transport astronauts between Orion and the lunar surface, while Axiom Space is developing new suits for moonwalks.
Artemis II is validating the transport system NASA intends to use to carry crews to the Moon and back. Wednesday’s successful liftoff was the first major milestone, paving the way for manual piloting demonstrations, trajectory correction burns, life-support system checkouts and, ultimately, a loop that will swing thousands of miles past the Moon’s far side.
