The astronauts were ‘caught’ by the moon, hours away from the crucial part

Koch is the first woman on NASA’s lunar mission, Glover the first African-American, and Hansen the first Canadian.

They took off on Wednesday night in the Orion capsule on the Space Launch System rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Center in the American federal state of Florida. About 24 hours later, they left Earth’s orbit in a special maneuver.

A few more hours to the moon

Artemis 2 builds on the experience of the Artemis 1 unmanned mission in 2022. Artemis 2’s flight path as a whole resembles a figure-eight shape around the Earth and the Moon. The crew is now scheduled to fly around the moon and land in Earth’s ocean on Friday.

In the next few hours, it is expected that the spacecraft should come closest to the Moon, about 7,500 kilometers from its dark side. From there, astronauts can see the Earth and the Moon at the same time, and even a solar eclipse in which the Sun disappears behind the Moon from Orion’s perspective.

They would also be able to travel further from Earth than any human has ever traveled before. The current record was set by the crew of the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 at about 400,171 kilometers.