Article text
Jeff Foust
5–7 minutes
Updated 9:45 p.m. Eastern with post-launch briefing details.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — The first human mission beyond Earth orbit in more than 50 years is underway with an April 1 launch of four astronauts on a flight around the moon.
The Space Launch System rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39B here at 6:35 p.m. Eastern on the Artemis 2 mission. After a normal ascent, the SLS upper stage and Orion spacecraft separated from the core stage about eight minutes later in a low transfer orbit.
“It was an amazing ride uphill,” Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman said in a transmission from Orion about three hours after launch.
During the countdown controllers reported an issue with the rocket’s flight termination system and, later, with one of the batteries in the launch abort system. Both issues were resolved before the opening of the launch window. Controllers also addressed a brief loss of telemetry from the vehicle.
On board the Orion spacecraft, called Integrity by its crew, are NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Wiseman is the commander of Artemis 2 and Glover the pilot, with Koch and Hansen serving as mission specialists.
The upper stage, called the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage or ICPS, performed a burn of its RL10 engine 49 minutes after liftoff to raise its perigee to 185 kilometers, ensuring it is in a stable orbit. A second burn about an hour later raised its apogee to more than 70,000 kilometers. Artemis 2 liftoff The Space Launch System ascends towards orbit on the Artemis 2 launch April 1. Credit: SpaceNews/Jeff Foust
Shortly after reaching orbit, NASA reported a loss of communications with Orion. Those communications were restored a short time later, and agency officials said a configuration issue during a handover between communications satellites may have caused the dropouts.
Astronauts also reported some other minor issues with Orion, such as problems setting up the toilet in the spacecraft, but nothing that appeared to jeopardize plans for the flight.
Orion will spend a day in this highly elliptical orbit, separating from the ICPS nearly three and a half hours after liftoff. The four astronauts will manually maneuver Orion around the ICPS and test spacecraft systems before Orion’s main engine fires to send the spacecraft on a free-return trajectory around the moon, with a splashdown off the coast from San Diego, California, late April 10.
Once Orion successfully performs that maneuver, the Artemis 2 crew will be the first humans to travel beyond Earth orbit since the three-man Apollo 17 crew in December 17.
“We’re looking to make sure that the life support system works” before performing the translunar injection, or TLI, maneuver, Norm Knight, director of the Flight Operations Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said at a post-launch briefing. “We are sure those are functional because once we commit to TLI, they have to function.”
He said controllers will also check to make sure vehicle systems handled the rigors of launch without problems, and that they have redundant communications, propulsion and other systems.
The workload on that first day will be among the hardest on the mission, Knight said, because of the level of activities checking out Orion ahead of the TLI maneuver. “They may not be feeling well on top of that” as they adjust to weightlessness, he added.
Artemis 2 is key test of Orion for future missions that send humans to the surface of the moon. When the Artemis 2 crew was named three years ago, the mission was scheduled to launch in late 2024 as a prelude to a landing attempt on Artemis 3 a year later. However, Artemis 2’s launch slipped by more than a year, primarily because of work to characterize the heat shield on the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission in late 2022 that suffered more erosion than expected.
Under revised plans NASA announced in late February, Artemis 3 will instead test Orion’s ability to rendezvous and dock with lunar landers under development by Blue Origin and SpaceX while in Earth orbit. That mission is projected to launch in mid-2027.
NASA’s first attempt to land humans on the moon since Apollo 17 is planned for Artemis 4 in early 2028, with a second landing attempt on Artemis 5 in late 2028. NASA will determine whether to use Blue Origin’s or SpaceX’s landers based on the progress the two companies make.
The Artemis 2 crew endorsed the revisions to the upcoming Artemis missions and plans by NASA announced March 24 to establish a moon base over the next decade.
“That fired us up. That gave us a lot of hope,” Wiseman said at a March 29 briefing. He said the crew changed their schedule to meet with planners for the revamped Artemis 3 “to go through all the things we want to feed forward in Artemis 3.”
“All of a sudden, the tempo has picked up. We are fired up. We are ready to go,” he said.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said at the post-launch briefing that he spoke with the crew after the Feb. 24 State of the Union address, which both he and the crew attended. He said he told them some of the details about the agency’s revised exploration plans that NASA announced one month later.
“It was very energizing for the crew,” he recalled. “This is a risky mission, for sure. Any type of new test flight mission going in this environment is going to be challenging. They knew it was building up to something bigger.”