Artemis mission heads to moon on debut flight
Nasa’s towering next-generation moon rocket blasted off from Florida early on Wednesday on its debut flight, a crewless voyage inaugurating the US space agency’s Artemis exploration programme 50 years after the final Apollo moon mission.
The 32-story Space Launch System (SLS) rocket surged off the launch pad from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 1.47am EST (8.47am in SA), to send its Orion capsule on a three-week test journey.
About 90 minutes after launch, the rocket’s upper stage fired thrusters for a “trans-lunar injection” burn propelling Orion out of Earth orbit on course for the moon.
That put the capsule on track for a 25-day flight that will bring it to within 97km of the lunar surface before sailing 64,374km beyond the moon and back to Earth.
Liftoff came on the third attempt at launching the longdelayed, multibillion-dollar rocket, after 10 weeks beset by numerous technical mishaps, back-to-back hurricanes and two excursions trundling the spacecraft out of its hangar to the launch pad.
Wednesday’s launch was not without its own drama. A threeman “red team” was scrambled out to the launch pad in the final hours of the countdown to tighten bolts on a loose connection identified as the source of a potentially flight-thwarting fuel leak.
Although specially trained to venture into the “blast zone” around a fully fueled rocket, the three were later hailed as heroes who may well have saved the mission.
“It’s a great day,” a beaming Nasa chief Bill Nelson later said in a brief post-launch webcast interview.
Named for the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt - and Apollo’s twin sister - Artemis aims to return astronauts to the moon’s surface as early as 2025.
The new moon program has enlisted commercial partners such as Elon Musk’s Spacex and the space agencies of Europe, Canada and Japan to eventually establish a long-term lunar base as a stepping stone to even more ambitious human voyages to Mars.
The Artemis I countdown climaxed with the rocket’s four main R-25 engines and its twin solid-rocket boosters roaring to life, producing 8.8 million pounds of thrust that sent the spacecraft streaking skyward and lighting up the night sky over Florida’s central Atlantic space coast.
The rocket’s thunder shook the space centre as a throng of spectators screamed and cheered and with excitement.
The capsule is due to splash down on December 11.
Sending astronauts to Mars is expected to take at least another 15 years.