- NASA's Orion space capsule and its crew were orbiting Earth on Thursday.
- An engine burn Thursday evening will propel the spaceship on a path to the moon.
- If schedule holds, Orion will reach the moon on April 6.
NASA’s Orion space capsule, nicknamed Integrity, was comfortably orbiting the Earth at an altitude of around 43,000 miles Thursday morning as it gets set for a critical moment later in the day — an engine burn that will send the ship and its four crew members on a path to the moon, and beyond.
The historic mission marks the first attempt to send a crewed ship to the moon since the final Apollo mission in the early ‘70s and launched successfully from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday afternoon.
The massive Space Launch System rocket, which successfully completed an unmanned flight in 2022, powered the Orion capsule and its crew into space amid blue skies and thousands of spectators gathered for an in-person opportunity to watch the launch. The mission is aiming to travel over 250,000 miles on an arc that takes the spaceship and its crew about 5,000 miles beyond the moon, which would be a record distance for human space travel, before returning to Earth.
The Artemis II crew is composed of three NASA astronauts including mission commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch as well as mission specialist Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency. The team trained for almost three years for the mission.
If Artemis II’s lunar flyby goes to plan, NASA intends to launch the SLS/Orion package on a mission in 2028 that would include a landing on the lunar surface.
In a Thursday morning report, NASA said it awakened the crew, queuing the song “Sleepyhead” by Young and Sick, at 5:06 a.m. MDT after a brief rest period. The astronauts were awakened to monitor an adjustment to the capsule’s orbit altitude in a change that put Orion into a stable high Earth orbit that aligns with its path to the moon. NASA said the crew members then moved back into a rest period before they’ll be roused again later to start their first full day in space.
Spaceship toilet problem resolved
The crew may have been resting a bit more comfortably after solving an issue with Orion’s toilet that was discovered shortly after launch Wednesday evening.
After giving astronaut Koch instructions on how to fix the specially designed loo, Mission Control radioed the crew: “Happy to report that toilet is go for use. ... We do recommend letting the system get to operating speed before donating fluid,” per a report from the BBC.
The next milestone for the Artemis II mission is a critical engine firing, the translunar injection burn, scheduled for 5:49 p.m. MDT Thursday. The procedure, which is the last major engine firing of the mission, will take Orion out of Earth orbit and propel the ship on a pathway to the moon.
“That puts us outbound to the moon,” Norm Knight, director of NASA’s Flight Operations Directorate said at a post-launch press conference on Wednesday. “That’s a real big commitment point.”
If the translunar burn goes to plan, Orion should reach the lunar neighborhood on Monday, April 6 before it slingshots around the satellite in a figure eight pattern that will bring the ship back home, powered by the pull of Earth’s gravity. NASA’s current schedule has Orion splashing down off the coast of San Diego on April 10.
NASA is live streaming the entire Artemis II mission here: