Fifty-four years after Apollo 17's Gene Cernan left his bootprints in lunar dust, humanity is heading back to the Moon.
NASA's Artemis II mission launched yesterday evening from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, blasting off aboard the colossal Space Launch System rocket at 11:35pm BST on April 1st. No, not a wind-up. Four astronauts are now aboard the Orion spacecraft, named *Integrity*, hurtling through space on a ten-day flyby of the Moon that marks the first crewed lunar voyage since 1972.
Commander Reid Wiseman leads the mission alongside pilot Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to fly beyond low Earth orbit. Mission specialist Christina Koch, who already holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, rounds out NASA's contingent. And then there's Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut and former fighter pilot who becomes the first non-American to fly a lunar mission. Take that, Apollo-era exclusivity.
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Hammock Koch, and CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen Early indications are very promising. Orion's solar arrays deployed perfectly, the core stage separation went off without a hitch, and the crew have already completed a proximity operations demonstration, manually flying the capsule in close quarters. Here's what's coming up:
Lift-off!**Tonight (April 2):** The translunar injection burn, a roughly six-minute engine firing around 1:00am BST on April 3rd, will sling Orion out of Earth orbit and onto its lunar trajectory.
**Monday, April 6:** The big one. Orion will swing around the far side of the Moon at roughly 6,500km from the surface. The crew will become the first humans to see parts of the lunar far side with their own eyes.
**Around April 11:** Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, expected in the early hours BST.
If all goes to plan, Artemis II proves the hardware works with humans aboard, clearing the path for Artemis III to actually land astronauts on the lunar surface. Watch this space. Literally.
