What we covered here
• Artemis II heads to the moon: Four astronauts on the Artemis II mission are on their way to journey around the moon after successfully conducting the translunar injection burn, or TLI. They are expected to spend about eight more days in space.
• What the astronauts said: “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it’s your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon,” Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen said in the crew’s first words since they set course. “With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth. We choose it,” astronaut Christina Koch said before TLI.
• Why this mission matters: The historic and risky lunar venture will mark the first time astronauts return to the vicinity of the moon in more than 50 years. The mission could travel farther from Earth than any human ever has, breaking the Apollo program’s distance record. Here’s what to expect on each day of the mission.
Our live coverage of the Artemis II launch has ended. Get the latest updates on the first crewed moon mission in over five decades by signing up for CNN’s Countdown newsletter here.
En route to the moon: A recap of what happened in the Artemis II mission today
The Artemis II crew is officially on their way to the moon, after successfully completing the critical translunar injection burn.
This burn was the last major engine firing of the mission and set the spacecraft on the free-return trajectory that will bring the crew back to Earth for splashdown.
Here’s what happened today:
- The crew slept in two cycles today. After four hours, they woke up to adjust the Orion capsule’s orbit and then went back to sleep for another four hours.
- When they woke up, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman completed his exercise routine on Orion’s flywheel exercise device, the first member of the crew to workout since launch.
- The TLI took five minutes. After the astronauts set their course, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen said, “humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it’s your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon.”
- The translunar injection burn was flawless, according to NASA officials, enabling humans to leave Earth orbit for the first time since 1972 during the Apollo 17 mission.
- During their first public affairs event with members of the media, Wiseman said that the true weight of this historic mission is sinking in for the astronauts. “Sending four humans 250 thousand miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realizing the gravity of that.” The crew also sounded shocked that the mission actually launched.
Check out what else is coming up in the mission here, which has over a week left to go.
CNN”s Asuka Koda and Lily Hautau contributed reporting to this post.
From a bathroom to a food warmer, the Orion spacecraft has some built-in luxuries
From the outside, the Orion capsule looks like a small space – especially if you’re going to be living, sleeping, eating and using the bathroom in it alongside three other people for 10 days.
But on the inside, the capsule space is equivalent to a campervan. And fortunately, two of the crew seats, as well as the footholds of the other two seats, will be stowed until the return to Earth.
The extra wiggle room is needed; each crew member will do a 30-minute workout nearly every day to keep their muscles and bones strong in the absence of gravity. A flywheel exercise device, smaller than a carry-on, can be used for rowing, squats and deadlifts.
While no showers are possible, each astronaut has a personal kit including no-rinse shampoo, baby wipes, toothbrushes and shaving accessories. But they will have a bathroom fitted with a space toilet and a door for privacy.
When it’s time to catch some Zs, the crew will use sleeping bags attached to the walls of Orion. And if they have any downtime, laptops and tablets loaded with movies, music and games can keep them entertained (that is, if the views of Earth, the moon and space aren’t riveting enough).
One of the luxuries will be a briefcase-size food warmer to make mealtime a little more comforting – as well as sweet treats like cake, pudding, cobbler, cookies, chocolate and candy-coated almonds.
People of Earth, "you look beautiful," Glover says
During the event, the crew was asked about what message they wanted to share with people on Earth, especially given the division across our planet.
“The first thing I would say is, trust us, you look amazing. You look beautiful,” said NASA astronaut Victor Glover. “And from up here, you also look like one thing. Homo sapiens is all of us, no matter where you’re from or what you look like. We’re all one people.”
Glover reflected with gratitude on being an astronaut and what it means to serve one’s country.
“We call amazing things that humans do moonshots for a reason, because this brought us together and showed us what we can do, not just putting our differences aside, when we bring our differences together and use all the strengths to accomplish something great. And so this mission will give us one of those that we all can remember and and hold on to for the rest of our days.”
NASA crunched some numbers. Here's how far Orion is expected to travel
According to the space agency’s pre-launch calculations, the Artemis II mission’s April 1 launch date was expected to allow the crew module to travel a maximum distance from Earth of 252,799 statute miles — besting the Apollo 13 record by 4,144 miles.
And after completing the translunar injection burn this evening, NASA was able to update their analysis with real data — and it’s lining up pretty closely.
The new estimate has the Artemis II crew reaching 252,021 statute miles from Earth. Quick math: That will surpass the Apollo 13 distance record by 3,366 statute miles, the space agency said.
The gravity of the mission is finally sinking in for the astronauts
While mission control in Houston looked incredibly calm during the translunar injection burn, which set Orion on its journey to the moon, the crew experienced some pretty tense moments, said Commander Reid Wiseman.
“When we got to that burn, we just kind of looked at each other as a crew. We have been to the moon before in 1968 through 1972. It’s been a long time since we’ve been back, and I got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this. Sending four humans 250 thousand miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realizing the gravity of that.”
The recent stunning views of Earth the crew witnessed through Orion’s window is giving them a preview of what’s to come, said NASA astronaut Christina Koch.
“Knowing that we’re about to have some similar views of the moon in that same way is definitely getting me more excited for it,” Koch said. “I knew that that is what we would see. But there’s nothing that prepares you for the breathtaking aspect of seeing your home planet both lit up bright as day and also the moon glow on it at night, with the beautiful beam of the sunset. And knowing that we’re going to get similar views of the moon, I’m just, I’m really excited for that.”
Artemis II launched on the first attempt. The crew was shocked, too
The SLS rocket that fired the Artemis II crew to orbit is a fickle beast, known to spring launch-attempt-ruining fuel leaks. Weather also looked threatening for long stretches of yesterday’s festivities.
But as the countdown clock neared the final moments, launch controllers gave the green light — firing the SLS rocket up on the first attempt to get it off the ground and almost at the very beginning of a two-hour launch window.
Frequent rocket-launch watchers know: It was a shockingly smooth launch day. And the astronauts were stunned too, pilot Victor Glover said from space Thursday, during a live public affairs event.
“It was surprising,” Glover said, sharing knowing smiles and chuckles with his crewmates. “We like to say that we’re prepared without having an expectation — but, in the back of your mind, you kind of hope you launch. And then when we got really close, it was like, ‘Wait, we’re getting ready to go to space?’”
Glove also gave a shoutout to the launch controllers who had been working — through practice runs and dress rehearsals — to smooth out the countdown process since February.
“I just want to give them some credit,” Glover said. “It was an example of how hard they’ve been working lately that we launched…it felt beautiful.”
Sleeping in space is as weird as you might think
Over the course of the 30 hours spent in space so far, the crew has only had time for two short naps, Commander Reid Wiseman said. And they actually just gathered for their first meal together in space.
But sleeping in space is a comical thing, he added.
“Christina has been sleeping heads down in the middle of the vehicle, kind of like a bat suspended from our docking tunnel,” Wiseman said. “Victor has a nice little nook wedged in there. And then Jeremy has been stretched out on seat one, and I’ve been sleeping under under the displays, just in case anything goes wrong. Every time I was dozing off last night, I had that image that I was tripping off a curb and I was waking myself up. So my body is getting reacclimated.”
What's it like in space? Chilly, but exciting
It’s Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s first time in space.
“I just kept saying to them yesterday, like I really like it up here,” Hansen said. “I wish I could have got here sooner. It’s just such a tremendous place to be. The views are extraordinary. It’s really fun to be floating around, and it just makes me feel like a little kid.”
NASA astronaut Christina Koch said the 8-minute ascent to space was surprisingly smooth: a steady rumble and a great ride.
Also, it turns out the temperature inside Orion is quite chilly — so much so that NASA astronaut Victor Glover said he wished they had brought different sleeping bags with them. But mission control is working with the crew to warm up the cabin.
A spectacular moment paused the crew in their tracks
Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman kicked off the public affairs event by giving a shoutout to all of the astronauts’ families, whom the crew have not yet been able to speak with, and described the stunning perspectives they’ve seen so far.
“There was a moment about an hour ago where Mission Control Houston reoriented our spacecraft as the sun was setting behind the earth. And I don’t know what we all expected to see at that moment, but you could see the entire globe, from pole to pole. You could see Africa, Europe, and if you looked really close, you could see the northern lights. It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.”
The crew is having their first public affairs event
We’re getting great views inside Orion as the Artemis II crew takes questions from ABC News and Fox News.
It’s the first of many public affairs events the crew will have throughout the mission.
Radiation in deep space is a serious threat. Here’s what scientists hope to learn about this deadly environment
The Artemis II flight path includes regions of Earth orbit that are laden with deadly radiation — including the Van Allen belts where radiation levels are particularly high because energetic particles lie trapped in Earth’s magnetosphere.
The astronauts’ spacecraft is designed to mostly shield them from danger, but they do have to seek shelter if a sudden spurt of solar activity rains radiation their way.
Radiation is such a concern that every astronaut is given a lifetime limit for exposure. Over the course of this 10-day mission, Koch, Glover, Hansen and Wiseman will burn through 5% of their lifetime caps.
For comparison, you’d have to spend an entire month on the International Space Station, which lies just a couple hundred miles above Earth, to reach that same level.
Those caps are important, said Dr. Tarah Castleberry, an associate professor of aerospace medicine with The University of Texas Medical Branch and a flight surgeon supporting the Artemis efforts, because exceeding them means “increased risk of cardiac disease, cognitive and performance decline over the long haul if you have a high total lifetime radiation exposure.”
One reason the radiation exposure is so high for the Artemis II crew: The astronauts will actually spend slightly more time traveling through the Van Allen belts than their Apollo predecessors because they will be entering a long looping orbit around Earth before ever traveling to the moon.
If space weather does emerge, the astronauts will also have a radiation shelter on board, and a real-time warning system that will sound an alarm if they need to take action.
What experiments are riding to space with the crew
The Artemis II crew has busy days ahead of them, some of which will include science experiments, as they travel around the moon and back.
Here’s a look at the science insights that could be gained from this deep space journey:
- A watch-like device called ARCHeR will monitor the well-being, activity and sleep patterns of the crew.
- The AVATAR experiment is sending organ-on-a-chip devices to measure the impacts of radiation and microgravity on human health.
- Blood and saliva samples from the crew could measure changes to the immune system.
- Photos taken of impact craters and ancient lava flows by the Artemis II crew during their flyby of the lunar far side could reveal more about the moon’s chaotic and mysterious history.
Shoebox-size satellites called cubeSats were also deployed from the spacecraft five hours after launch.
The satellites, supplied by space agencies from Germany, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Argentina, will measure the different aspects of the harsh environment of space.
- Germany’s TACHELES will see how space impacts electrical components that could be used on future lunar vehicles.
- K-Rad Cube contains humanlike tissue to measure the effects of space radiation across the Van Allen belts surrounding Earth – two dangerous bands of radiation resulting from trapped concentrations of high-energy solar particles that interact with Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA.
- Saudi Space Agency’s CubeSat will measure space weather, or energetic particles unleashed by the sun that can impact Earth.
- Argentina’s ATENEA will test radiation shielding methods and a long-range communications link.
If danger strikes, these are the crew's options
The Orion spacecraft — nicknamed “Integrity” by the crew — is on a slingshot “free return ” trajectory, meaning the caspule is set to use the moon’s gravity to fling itself back home. Essentially, this spacecraft would still head out around the moon and whip around back toward Earth even if its engines never fired again.
But that doesn’t mean it’s engines won’t fire again. NASA is targeting a very precise path, so Orion will light up its engines a few more times for some minor course corrections. And that’s all fully autonomous: The crew got to manually pilot the vehicle yesterday for a brief time, but that test milestone is behind them, and computers are taking it from here.
What could derail all those plans, however, is if Orion runs into some sort of issue — whether its a meteroite strike or some sort of event that affects crew safety.
And NASA is prepared if that happens at any moment.
“We have basically continuous abort coverage through the mission” — from the moment the SLS rocket lit up yesterday until the astronauts splash down in the ocean, said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator.
Now that the translunar injection burn has occurred, the astronauts have the option to conduct a “direct abort” — “where you can turn Orion around and fire the main engine and bring it home more quickly than if you were to proceed along,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator.
But, as the crew gets closer to the moon, they will reach a point of no return — when it’s actually safer to just finish out the free return trajectory and make the trip around the moon than to try to fire the engines and turn back, Kshatriya added.
The path to becoming an astronaut
Each member of the Artemis II crew had a different journey to becoming an astronaut.
But after being selected as an astronaut candidate, what are those early days like? We asked Anna Menon, one of ten new astronauts selected by NASA in September.
Menon is the first person ever to join the NASA astronaut corps who has previously flown to orbit. She formerly worked at SpaceX and flew aboard the Polaris Dawn mission alongside now-NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. The experimental mission traveled higher in its orbit around Earth than any crewed spacecraft had flown in decades.
Menon said she and her classmates hit the ground running to start their two-year training program right after the selection.
“This involves everything from learning to fly NASA’s T-38s to learning to do a spacewalk, learning spacecraft systems such as on the ISS, robotics training and a lot of other things as well. And we have all been tackling that over the past few months,” Menon said in January.
Menon’s favorite part so far? Robotics training and learning how to utilize the robotic arm located outside of the International Space Station.
“It was a really fun three-dimensional puzzle that requires a lot of attention to detail, care and concern to make sure you’re doing it well,” Menon said. “And so I love the challenge.”
The man making sure the Artemis II crew gets back to Earth safely
Rick Henfling, the lead Artemis II entry flight director, is primarily responsible for the mission’s most critical stretch: ensuring the Orion crew capsule returns home safely.
Orion will enter Earth’s atmosphere — a point known as entry interface — at about 25,000 miles per hour (about 40,200 kilometers per hour), transitioning from the vacuum of space to a dense atmosphere and enduring temperatures about half as hot as the surface of the sun at nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). However, unlike spacecraft returning from the International Space Station, there is only one shot, with no option to wait, for example, for weather conditions on the ground to improve.
“I’m super confident in the team’s ability to execute,” Henfling told CNN earlier this year. “But once we hit entry interface, and the heat starts building up on the heat shield, there’s no turning back. We’re coming in and, you know, we’re going to safely finish that mission.”
Several former NASA engineers and a former astronaut have expressed concern to CNN that the bottom part of the Orion spacecraft, called the heat shield, which is designed to protect the astronauts from extreme temperatures, isn’t safe. This vital part is nearly identical to the heat shield flown on Artemis I, which returned from space with its 16.5-feet wide shield pockmarked by unexpected damage — prompting NASA to investigate the issue.
Henfling, however, is confident that re-entry will go smoothly. NASA had modified the landing trajectory to “make it a more benign environment on the heat shield,” he said.
“I have a lot of confidence in the engineering that was done and the testing that was done,” he said. “And so when I sit console on entry day, the heat shield is not going to be something that I’m thinking about.”
The Artemis astronauts are sorting a couple issues: dirty windows and a dead PC
The Artemis II crew has been dealing with a couple of issues that won’t sound unfamiliar to those of us on Earth. But in space, everything requires a little extra care when troubleshooting.
NASA astronaut Christina Koch reported that her PCD, or portable computing device, went dark before translunar injection and has been unresponsive ever since. So far, solutions suggested by mission control have not been able to revive the computer, but they’re looking into other options to bring it back online.
Commander Reid Wiseman said that the windows of Orion are already dirty because the crew enjoyed looking out of them so much. He asked for the right procedures to clean the windows.
The voice of mission control
If everyone on the ground at mission control in Houston spoke to the astronauts inside the Orion spacecraft, it would be noisy and confusing.
Since Project Mercury in the 1960s, all communication with NASA astronauts has been streamlined through a single person known as capcom or capsule communicator.
Their job is to ensure the crew receives clear and concise communication from the teams supporting them on the ground in Houston. Typically, capcoms are astronauts themselves, who act as the bridge between mission control and the crew.
Artemis II will have multiple capcoms to cover the 10-day mission, with each day divided into three eight-hour shifts. These individuals include NASA astronaut Stan Love, who is lead capcom, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jenni Gibbons.
“My role is to synthesize the information of the flight control team in mission control and send calls to the crew that’s on that capsule,” Gibbons said in a February video. “You have to have very good systems knowledge, you have to be tough, you have to be competent and you have to really nail concise communication so the crew knows exactly what to do and limit the back-and-forth or inefficiencies in those calls.”
This is Artemis II, paging the ISS
The Artemis II crew is expected to make a special call to other humans currently in space at the moment: The seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station. NASA officials said the ship-to-ship call is expected to occur on the seventh day of the mission.
Ahead of the launch of the Crew-12 mission to the ISS, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir shared in January that part of the Artemis II flight plan is a scheduled call between the Orion spacecraft and the space station.
She’s excited to talk to Christina Koch, whom Meir embarked on the first all-female spacewalk with in 2019, as well her astronaut classmate Victor Glover and “astronaut uncles,” Reid Weisman and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Meir said she and her crew members aboard the space station look forward to following the journey of their friends and colleagues around the moon.
“We’re all very excited to be in space at the same time,” Meir said.
The Artemis II crew hasn't had time to speak with family yet
The Artemis II astronauts have been so busy since launching to space on their historic mission that they haven’t had time to talk to their families yet. But that’s about to change.
Now that the crucial translunar injection burn has been completed, setting Orion on a path to the moon as well as returning to Earth, the crew’s jam-packed schedule will ease a little bit, NASA officials said. That should open up time for the crew to speak with their families — and even enjoy taking photos of Earth.
