The Artemis II rocket launched at 6:35 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Artemis II consists of the 98-meter-tall Space Launch System (SLS) and the crewed Orion capsule. Four astronauts are aboard Orion: Commander Reid Wiseman, NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
This marks the first launch of a crewed spacecraft for lunar exploration since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The total flight duration for the mission is 10 days. The planned flight distance is 1,102,400 kilometers.
The primary objectives are to test Orion's life support systems and assess the effects of space radiation on the human body. On the first day of launch, the crew will orbit Earth and gradually increase altitude from low orbit. On the second day, they will ignite Orion's engine to head toward the Moon. The crew will then fly one loop around the Moon at an altitude of 6,437 to 9,656 kilometers, observing areas of the lunar surface never before seen with the naked eye. The mission concludes on Day 10 when Orion splashes down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego.
Attention is also focused on K-RadCube, a Korean-built CubeSat carried aboard the spacecraft. Its core mission is to collect fundamental data by directly measuring space radiation while repeatedly passing through the Van Allen radiation belts, a region of intense radiation. The data will be used to analyze the effects of radiation on astronauts and space-grade semiconductor devices and components.