Artemis II Crew Rockets from Florida's Space Coast, Leaves Earth Orbit After 52 Years

Twenty-five hours after lifting off from Kennedy Space Center on Florida's Space Coast, four astronauts fired their Orion capsule's engines Thursday night and broke free of Earth's orbit, becoming the first humans to leave for the moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

The translunar ignition — a precisely timed burn that accelerated the capsule to more than 24,000 mph — put Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on course for a lunar flyby expected early next week. Their Orion spacecraft is now chasing the moon nearly 250,000 miles away on a free-return trajectory, using the gravitational pull of both Earth and moon to execute a figure-eight loop back home.

For the thousands of engineers, contractors, and support workers based at Kennedy Space Center, the mission represents the most significant human spaceflight achievement of their careers — and a direct validation of more than a decade of work on the Space Launch System and Orion program that has employed Brevard County's aerospace workforce through multiple administrations.

"For the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit," NASA official Lori Glaze announced at a news conference Thursday. She called the engine firing flawless.

The crew has already made history before reaching the moon. Glover is the first Black person, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-U.S. citizen ever to travel moonward. Apollo's 24 lunar travelers were all white men.

"From up here you also look like one thing: homo sapiens — all of us, no matter where you're from or what you look like, we're all one people," Glover said in a crew interview from space.

Not everything has gone smoothly. Orion's toilet malfunctioned shortly after reaching orbit Wednesday, forcing Koch to troubleshoot plumbing fixes guided by Mission Control. A separate valve issue with the capsule's water dispenser prompted the crew to fill contingency urine bags with more than two gallons of drinking water as a precaution — a workaround NASA confirmed before the translunar burn.

The mission is scheduled to reach its farthest point — some 4,000 miles beyond the moon's far side — on Monday, breaking the distance record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. Splashdown is targeted for April 10. NASA is counting on Artemis II to validate systems needed for a crewed lunar landing, currently planned for 2028.

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