The Artemis II mission successfully launched into space on April 1 at 6:35 pm Eastern Time from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will carry NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day trip around the moon. This mission is the first crewed Artemis flight and will lay the groundwork for future trips to the Moon, the first flight with a crew on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft system and our first flight in deep space since the Apollo program.
A few hours had passed into their journey and the astronauts could already see spectacular views of our planet. However, the astronauts also reported a problem with their waste management system, which is the first real toilet installed on a deep space mission. Thankfully, astronauts have a backup option: waste collection bags that Apollo crews used and previously dumped on the lunar surface.
By 10:43 p.m. Eastern, the Orion spacecraft carrying four astronauts successfully separated from the upper stage of the Space Launch System rocket. Glover then began manually operating the capsule to demonstrate and test how Orion would move and dock with future lunar landers that will be built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. You can watch the events that happened within the first few hours of the mission below. The crew and their Orion capsule are expected to touch down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10.
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