Blastoff! 🌕 NASA's Artemis I mission successfully launched overnight bringing the U.S. a big step closer to putting astronauts back on the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago. See video here:
, when 12 astronauts walked on the moon from 1969 and 1972. Crowds also gathered outside NASA centers in Houston and Huntsville, Alabama, to watch the spectacle on giant screens.
The liftoff marked the start of NASA’s Artemis lunar-exploration program, named after Apollo’s mythological twin sister. The space agency is aiming to send four astronauts around the moon on the next flight, in 2024, and land humans there as early as 2025. Orion should reach the moon by Monday, more than 230,000 miles from Earth. After coming within 80 miles of the moon, the capsule will enter a far-flung orbit stretching about 40,000 miles beyond.
The rocket was supposed to have made its dry run by 2017. Government watchdogs estimate NASA will have spent $93 billion on the project by 2025. NASA has hired Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop Starship, the 21st-century answer to Apollo's lunar lander. Starship will carry astronauts back and forth between Orion and the lunar surface, at least on the first trip in 2025. The plan is to station Starship and eventually other companies' landers in orbit around the moon, ready for use whenever new Orion crews pull up.
NASA is waiting until this test flight is over before introducing the astronauts who will be on the next one and those who will follow in the bootsteps of Apollo 11′s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
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