If all goes well during the three-week flight, the rocket will propel an empty crew capsule into a wide orbit around the Moon, before the capsule returns to Earth with a dive into the Pacific in December. After years of delays and billions in cost overruns, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket thundered skyward, lifting from the Kennedy Space Center with 4 million pounds of thrust and hitting 100 mph in seconds. “I’m telling you, we’ve never seen a tail of flame like this,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who followed the launch with a group of astronauts. “There were a bunch there that would have liked to be in that rocket and I have to say, from what we saw tonight, it’s an A-plus,” he said. The Orion capsule was perched atop the rocket and, less than two hours into the flight, it broke from Earth’s orbit toward the Moon. “For the Artemis generation, this is for you,” launch manager Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said shortly before liftoff, referring to people who didn’t live for the Apollo program, which ended 50 years ago. She later told her team, “You’ve earned your place in history.” The launch marked the start of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister. The space agency plans to send four astronauts around the Moon on its next flyby, in 2024, and land humans there as early as 2025.
Landing after months of delays
The launch follows nearly three months of troublesome fuel leaks that kept the rocket bouncing between its hangar and pad. A series of hydrogen fuel leaks plagued launch attempts over the summer as well as countdown tests. A new leak broke out in a new location during refueling on Tuesday night, but an emergency team was able to clamp the faulty valve in the pad. Then a US Space Force radar station went down, resulting in another showdown, this time over the replacement of an ethernet switch. The 98-meter-long SLS is the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, with more thrust than either the Space Shuttle or the mighty Saturn V that carried men to the Moon. Orion should reach the Moon by Monday, more than 370,000 km from Earth. After reaching within 130 kilometers of the Moon, the capsule will enter a distant orbit that will extend about 64,000 kilometers beyond. Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin said the rocket is working mostly as it should. He said there were some minor issues that he called “funny,” but Sarafin and other officials emphasized that all systems are “working.” Orion program manager Howard Hu said NASA will continue to test Artemis’ engines and other functions, especially in the conditions of space. In a post-launch press conference, Nelson said, “This is just the test flight, and we’re stressing it and testing it in a way that we wouldn’t with a human crew on it. But that’s the goal, to make it as close as possible.” safe, as reliable as possible, when our astronauts crawl into the craft and return to the Moon.”
Test flight dummies in orbit for 25 days
The $4.1 billion (€3.9 billion) test flight is scheduled to last 25 days, about the same time the crews will board. The space agency plans to push the spacecraft to its limits and uncover any problems before the astronauts go inside. The mannequins — NASA calls them moons — are equipped with sensors to measure things like vibration, acceleration and cosmic radiation. “There is quite a bit of risk with this particular initial flight test,” Sarafin said. The rocket was supposed to be dry-running by 2017. Government watchdogs estimate that NASA will have spent $93 billion (€90 billion) on the project by 2025. Ultimately, NASA hopes to establish a base on the Moon and send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
