![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_0593-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The Artemis II crew, left to right: Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch. The astronauts departed crew quarters to head for the launch pad around four hours prior to liftoff.<\/p>\n
Credit:
\n Stephen Clark\/Ars Technica<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
Off to the races<\/h2>\n
Wednesday\u2019s launch set all of that in motion. The SLS rocket surpassed the speed of sound just one minute after liftoff. The launcher\u2019s twin boosters consumed their solid propellant in a little more than two minutes after reaching an altitude of more than 150,000 feet, then jettisoned to fall into the Atlantic Ocean. They won\u2019t be recovered.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The four-engine core stage continued firing for another six minutes, accelerating Artemis II to near-orbital velocity. During this burn, the rocket shed its launch abort system and aeroshell panels that protected the Orion spacecraft during the initial climb through the atmosphere. The rocket hit all of its milestone events right on time before the core stage shut off its engines and separated from the Orion spacecraft and upper stage a little more than eight minutes into the flight.<\/p>\n
With engines off, the spacecraft coasted through space for more than 40 minutes. Orion extended its four power-generating solar panels before the next major event, a critical burn of the upper stage\u2019s RL10 engine to put the spacecraft into a stable low-Earth orbit. A second firing of the RL10, nearly two hours after launch, will send the spacecraft into a much higher orbit, an elliptical arc extending more than 40,000 miles from Earth, higher than anyone has flown since 1972.<\/p>\n
The next mission event will be the separation of Orion from the SLS rocket\u2019s upper stage nearly three-and-a-half hours after launch. At that point, the astronauts will begin one of their first tasks of the mission. After flying a short distance from the rocket, Glover will take manual control of the Orion spacecraft to re-approach the upper stage. Glover will fire thrusters to slowly guide Orion back to the rocket, assessing the ship\u2019s handling characteristics and its responsiveness to manual commands.<\/p>\n
The layout of Orion\u2019s cockpit is familiar to Glover, who flew F\/A-18 Super Hornets in the Navy. Orion\u2019s manual controls contrast with the touchscreen displays of SpaceX\u2019s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which Glover flew to the International Space Station on his first trip to space in 2020.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are physical rotational hand controllers and translational hand controllers, and this thing that we call a cursor control device, which is something you hold in your hand and hit buttons,\u201d Glover told Ars before the Artemis II mission. \u201cThe crew (on Orion) has to be much more proficient to know where to go to see the right information. The SpaceX vehicle was built so that your kids could jump off their video games and jump in Dragon. A lot of it is intuitive, and that\u2019s a good thing. That\u2019s the paradigm that they are shooting for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like Dragon, Orion is designed to fly on autopilot, but astronauts want to have the ability to take control of the spacecraft if necessary. Future missions will require the Orion spacecraft to dock with lunar landers in orbit around the Earth or the Moon.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are essentially going to make sure that the vehicle flies the way that we think it does, that we designed it to do,\u201d Glover said. \u201cWe\u2019re not only going to fly the vehicle manually. We\u2019re going to execute all six degrees of freedom, so translating forward, backward, left, right, up, and down, and then also pitch, yaw, and roll.\u201d<\/p>\n
This phase of the mission is known as the rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration. The astronauts will not only fly the spaceship; they will also provide verbal feedback on their experiences as Orion moves as close as 30 feet, or 10 meters, from the upper stage. \u201cI\u2019m going to put my communication system\u2026 on voice activation so I can just talk to the ground continuously,\u201d Glover said.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
The upper stage will vent all of its hydrogen fuel before Orion moves in close. The maneuvers will last about 90 minutes, enough time for Orion to first approach the nose of the rocket, then fly off the side of the upper stage before a final \u201cbreakout burn\u201d to depart the rocket for good.<\/p>\n
Wiseman will assist Glover with the manual piloting demo. Koch will make sure the pilots follow the proper procedures. Hansen will have the especially important job of watching the rocket through Orion\u2019s window. On this mission, the spacecraft lacks a rangefinder to measure the distance between Orion and the upper stage.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will be using subtended angles, how big the upper stage looks out the window or through a camera,\u201d Glover said. \u201cSo we are the primary hazard avoidance system, these eyes, in our assessment of how close we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
The pace of activity onboard Orion will slow down after the capsule completes its final backaway from the upper stage. The astronauts will begin activating the ship\u2019s life support systems as mission controllers in Houston conduct a comprehensive checkout of the spacecraft. These milestones will occur as Orion continues an outbound arc toward the high point of its orbit, or apogee.<\/p>\n
Upon reaching apogee, around 8 am EDT (12:00 UTC) Thursday, the capsule will fire its thrusters to reshape its orbit to set up for a pivotal trans-lunar injection engine firing Thursday evening. This six-minute burn by Orion\u2019s main engine will send the spacecraft toward the Moon. This all assumes engineers don\u2019t find any significant problems on the first day of the mission.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the life support system, the checkout that we get is a critical objective,\u201d said Amit Kshatriya, NASA\u2019s associate administrator. \u201cIf it turns out that we don\u2019t get the performance we need after the acceleration and vibe (vibration of launch), we\u2019ll come home. We\u2019re not going to commit to the Moon if we don\u2019t have the performance.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.\u2014Three Americans and one Canadian launched into orbit from Florida\u2019s Space Coast on Wednesday, flying the most powerful rocket ridden by humans on the first leg of a nine-day voyage around the Moon. Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the four astronauts lifted off from NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[783,5942,5894,4370],"class_list":["post-44042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-artemis-2","tag-artemis-ii","tag-rocket-launch","tag-sls-rocket"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44042"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44042\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}