NASA’s 32-story mega-lunar rocket blasted the night sky from a little point in the Atlantic Ocean, blazing statuesquely. The new Orion spacecraft’s towering monument then roared with a force comparable to 160,000 Corvette engines as the timer for ignition expired. The explosion sent toe-tingling vibrations throughout miles of east Florida shoreline. Prior to the first flight with crew aboard Artemis II, Artemis I’s main objectives are to show Orion’s systems in a spaceflight environment and to guarantee a safe re-entry, descent, splashdown, and recovery.
At 1:48 p.m The Artemis I mission, NASA’s first space flight of an astronaut-capable spacecraft in 50 years, was launched on Wednesday, November 16. If all goes as planned, Orion will travel more than a quarter of a million miles from Earth on a whirlwind voyage that includes a swing past the moon at a distance of 40,000 miles. On December 11, when it returns to the Pacific, the US space agency anticipates it to have travelled 1.3 million miles. The triangle shape and the hues of silver, orange, red, white, and blue are among the design features of the Artemis I mission patch that have symbolic significance for this important journey. NASA hopes to establish a base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
