On Wednesday evening, four astronauts strapped into the Orion spacecraft atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and lifted off from Kennedy Space Center into what amounts to the agency’s biggest gamble in decades. The 322-foot-tall rocket thundered skyward at 6:35 pm EDT, carrying three Americans and one Canadian on a nine-day voyage around the Moon that will test whether NASA can actually pull off its ambitious Artemis program.
This isn’t just another spaceflight. NASA has sunk close to $100 billion into Artemis over two decades, and the stakes are higher now because China is racing to put humans on the lunar surface. Wednesday’s launch was the first major test of whether that investment pays off.
The Rocket That Outsizes History
The SLS rocket hit all its milestones right on schedule. Its four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and twin solid rocket boosters fired up with a collective 8.8 million pounds of thrust, outclassing the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon during Apollo. Within a minute, the rocket surpassed the speed of sound. The boosters burned out and jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean around two minutes later, which is notable because they won’t be recovered. This isn’t SpaceX’s reusable approach. NASA’s betting on a different model here.
The core stage continued burning for six minutes total, peeling away the launch abort system and aeroshell panels that protected the spacecraft during ascent before shutting down and separating from Orion roughly eight minutes into flight. After coasting through space for 40 minutes, the spacecraft extended its solar panels and fired its upper stage engine to slip into a stable low-Earth orbit.
Commander Reid Wiseman, a 50-year-old Navy captain and former test pilot, radioed updates from the cockpit alongside pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. Everything worked.
Testing Orion’s Hands-On Flying
Here’s where Wednesday’s launch becomes a real test rather than just a rocket ride. Nearly three and a half hours after liftoff, Orion will separate from the upper stage. At that point, Glover will take manual control of the spacecraft and fly it back toward the rocket’s upper stage, essentially practicing a rendezvous and proximity operation that future missions will need to execute for real.
This matters because Orion’s cockpit design is old-school compared to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. It has physical rotational hand controllers, translational hand controllers, and what Glover calls “a cursor control device.” According to reporting from Ars Technica, Glover explained the difference bluntly: “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’s a good thing. That’s the paradigm that they are shooting for.” Orion isn’t trying to be intuitive. It’s trying to give experienced pilots the ability to control the spacecraft in ways that match how it was designed to fly.
The demonstration will push Orion to within 30 feet of the upper stage while the crew practices all six degrees of freedom: forward, backward, left, right, up, down, plus pitch, yaw, and roll. Jeremy Hansen has the particularly important job of watching the rocket through the window and calculating distance based on how big the upper stage looks. Orion doesn’t have a rangefinder for this phase, so the astronauts are essentially the hazard avoidance system.
Around the Moon and Back
Assuming the manual flying demo goes smoothly and mission controllers don’t spot any problems during a comprehensive life support system checkout, Orion will fire its main engine Thursday evening for a six-minute burn that sends the spacecraft toward the Moon. From there, the crew will follow a free return trajectory, using lunar gravity to slingshot back toward Earth.
The spacecraft will reach a distance of 252,799 miles from Earth on Monday, April 6. That’s farther than anyone has traveled since 1972, when the last lunar astronauts left the Moon. The crew will see parts of the far side of the Moon never observed by human eyes before. Scientists want to compare their naked-eye observations with imagery from robotic missions.
On the way home, Earth’s gravity will accelerate Orion to roughly 25,000 mph as it plunges back into the atmosphere. Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off California is scheduled for April 10.
The Catch in the Plan
This mission won’t land on the Moon. That comes later, currently targeted for Artemis IV in 2028. NASA is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop human-rated lunar landers, and Axiom Space is building new spacesuits. Artemis II is purely about proving the transportation system works end-to-end.
But there’s a low-key pressure baked into every decision here. Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, put it plainly when discussing the life support system checkout: “If it turns out that we don’t get the performance we need after the acceleration and vibe of launch, we’ll come home. We’re not going to commit to the Moon if we don’t have the performance.” In other words, NASA will abort if something doesn’t look right. That’s cautious, which is appropriate. But it also means the agency has built real consequences into this test.
The 1972 mission that last brought humans home from the Moon feels impossibly distant now. Fifty-two years without human footsteps on another world, while we’ve built computers that fit in our pockets and sent rovers to Mars. Wednesday’s launch suggests NASA might finally be ready to fill that gap, assuming everything the engineers designed actually works the way they think it will.
