Artemis II, the first crewed flight of the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on a ten-day journey around the Moon and back. This official NASA recap gathers the launch-day highlights as astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen began humanity’s return to lunar space, according to the agency.
Video: NASA (official channel). Embedded via YouTube; Forever News Media does not host or copy this footage.
The recap compresses into minutes the sequence the programme had rehearsed for a decade: the count, the ignition, the slow first seconds as the most powerful rocket NASA has flown with a crew cleared the tower at Kennedy. The four names aboard carry the mission’s symbolism openly — Wiseman commanding, Glover as pilot, Koch as mission specialist, and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen flying as the first non-American assigned to a lunar mission, the international architecture of the Artemis era written into the crew manifest itself.
What the next ten days must prove
Artemis II is a test flight wearing a historic voyage’s clothes. It will not land, and it will not enter lunar orbit; its purpose is to prove, with people aboard, that Orion’s life support, heat shield, communications and manual handling can carry a crew around the Moon and home at lunar-return speed. Everything the later landing missions will be is mortgaged against those systems performing for ten days beyond the magnetosphere — farther from home than any humans have travelled since 1972. The launch recap is the beginning of that examination, not its result. Forever News Media will follow the mission’s daily milestones as NASA reports them.
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