A little more than an hour before sunset on Florida’s Space Coast, up to 400,000 beachgoers and boarders will look to the skies Wednesday to see a fiery wonder that hasn’t been seen in nearly 54 years: a complete NASA rocket returning to the moon.
The launch of Artemis II, scheduled for 6.24pm ET if the weather and the latest gremlins permit, is the first time since the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972 that humans have left low Earth.
“The nation and the world, they’ve been waiting a long time to do this again,” Reid Wiseman, a NASA astronaut and commander of Artemis II, told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday as a team of three Americans and one Canadian arrived for a pre-launch briefing.
Their 10-day test flight, which will not land on the moon, is an eventful mission. The two crew members, Nasa’s Christina Koch and Victor Glover, will respectively be the first woman and the first person of color to fly into cislunar space, the space between the Earth’s orbit and the moon.
A fourth crew member, Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, will be the first non-American to do the same.
In total, the Artemis II Orion capsule would fly farther from Earth than any of its predecessors. Wednesday’s announcement will likely see them reach a distance of more than 4,600 miles (7,400km) beyond the moon on the sixth day of flight, and within 253,000 kilometers of home, breaking the April 1970 record of 248,655 kilometers set by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.
Before Donald Trump returned to office, NASA was celebrating the diversity of the Artemis crew on its website, but it dropped the recognition last year – following a presidential order that ordered federal agencies to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices and languages.
Glover, who is African American, and Koch were also careful to downplay the importance of their position in pre-flight discussions.
“It’s not about celebrating one person,” Koch said during Monday’s final press conference.
“If there’s anything to celebrate, it’s that we’re in a time where anyone who has a dream works equally hard to achieve that dream. If we’re not going for the good of all, we’re really not answering the whole human call to explore.”
Glover was also cautious. “I live in this divide between the joy that a young woman can look at Christina and express her desire or her interests… that little boys and girls can look at me and say, ‘Hey, she’s like me, and what are you doing?’ And that’s good. I like that,” he said.
“But I also hope that we push in the other direction, that one day we don’t have to talk about these firsts, that one day this is human history, a personal story, not black history, not women’s history.”
Politics aside, NASA is eager for the Artemis II lunar mission to succeed as the basis for ambitious plans announced last month by newly confirmed space agency director Jared Isaacman for a $20bn (£15bn) moon landing by the end of the decade.
The main part of this mission is to photograph, from an altitude of 4,000 to 6,000 miles, the areas of the south pole of the moon where the next human landing is planned and the location of the last moon.
The long journey also gives the astronauts time to test critical equipment and life support that will be needed for the program’s future flights, including Artemis IV, the historic crewed mission planned for 2028 that will finally return human feet to the lunar surface.
Artemis II astronauts will have their lives monitored at every stage, including a study of the effects of increased radiation and microgravity. They must live together in a five-meter-wide capsule, with an interior height equal to a small tent van, until the splash in the Pacific Ocean at the end of their 685,000-mile odyssey.
“Like clicking the lid of a pen can upset someone who spends more than 10 days in a small capsule,” said Wiseman, who has spent every day with his staff since they were elected in April 2023.
“We have a good conversation together, and we talk about those kinds of things, but there’s definitely going to be things on day six, seven, eight, nine that we’re like, ‘Man, okay, I need a little space, and I can’t get it right now.’ But we are a good team. ”
The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule stack stand at 322ft (98m) on the launch pad, and will split into stages at different points in its ascent. NASA is confident that it has solved the heat shield problem that led to the activation of the nerves for Artemis I, and the helium leak that forced Artemis II to return to its assembly building in February, and led NASA to postpone the next test launch in April.
NASA’s final weather report on Tuesday suggested an 80% chance of good conditions, and if a clear announcement is made, NASA has a window to try again every five nights.
This week in Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, which is already busy with spring breaks, the excitement for the launch is increasing, and hotel rooms are in short supply.
It’s a sentiment echoed inside the Kennedy Space Center, where engineers and mission managers have spent years planning the next steps in the Artemis program. It was intended to deliver a man moon at the beginning of the decade, but it is running years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
“Nasa was founded to do big, bold endeavors in air and space, to do the near-impossible,” Isaacman told reporters earlier this year.
“Next is America’s return to the lunar environment.” What we learn from that mission will help America return to the moon.
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