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A little more than an hour before sunset on Florida’s space coast, up to 400,000 people packed on beaches and causeways will look to the heavens on Wednesday to witness a fiery spectacle not seen in almost 54 years: a fully crewed Nasa rocket heading back to the moon.
The launch of Artemis II, scheduled for 6.24pm ET if weather and any late technical gremlins grant their consent, marks the first time since the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972 that humans will have left lower Earth orbit.
“The nation, and the world, has been waiting a long time to do this again,” Reid Wiseman, a veteran Nasa astronaut and the Artemis II commander, told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday as the crew of three Americans and one Canadian arrived to enter quarantine ahead of launch.
Their 10-day test flight, which will not land on the moon, is a mission packed with milestones. Two of the crew, Nasa’s Christina Koch and Victor Glover, will become respectively the first woman and first person of color to fly into cislunar space, the area between Earth’s orbit and the moon.
The fourth crew member, the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, will become the first non-American to do the same.
Collectively, Artemis II’s Orion space capsule could fly them farther from Earth than any human being before them. A Wednesday launch would probably see them reach more than 4,600 miles (7,400km) beyond the far side of the moon on flight day six, and just short of 253,000 miles from home, breaking the April 1970 record of 248,655 miles set by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.
Before Donald Trump’s return to office, Nasa celebrated the diversity of Artemis crews on its website, but dropped the recognition last year – keeping with the president’s executive order that directed federal agencies to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices and language.
Glover, who is African American, and Koch, were also cautious to downplay the significance of their status in pre-flight interviews.
“It’s not about celebrating any one individual,” Koch said during the crew’s final media briefing on Monday.
“If there’s something to celebrate it’s that we are at a time when anyone who has a dream gets to work equally hard to achieve that dream. If we’re not going for all and by all, we’re not truly answering all of humanity’s call to explore.”
Glover was equally circumspect. “I live in this dichotomy between happiness that a young woman can look at Christina and just physicalize her passion or her interests … that young brown boys and girls can look at me and go, ‘Hey, he looks like me, and he’s doing what?’ And that’s great. I love that,” he said.
“But I also hope we are pushing the other direction, that one day we don’t have to talk about these firsts, that one day this is human history, the story of humanity, not Black history, not women’s history.”
Politics aside, Nasa is keen for Artemis II’s lunar flyby to succeed as a foundation stone for ambitious plans announced last month by the space agency’s newly confirmed administrator Jared Isaacman for a $20bn (£15bn) moon base by the end of the decade.
A key part of this mission is to photograph, from a height of 4,000 to 6,000 miles, areas of the moon’s south pole where the next human landing and the eventual lunar base are planned.
The long journey also gives the astronauts time to test crucial hardware and life-support systems that will be needed for the program’s future flights, including Artemis IV, the historic crewed mission scheduled for 2028 that will finally place human footprints back on the lunar surface.
The Artemis II astronauts will have their health monitored at every stage, including a study of the effects of increased radiation and microgravity. They must live together in the confines of the five-meter diameter of the capsule, which has an interior volume the size of a small camper van, until splashdown in the Pacific Ocean at the end of their 685,000-mile odyssey.
“Like clicking a pen cap can annoy somebody over 10 days in a small capsule,” said Wiseman, who has spent almost every day with his crew since their selection in April 2023.
“We have got a great dialog together, and we talk through those sorts of things, but there are definitely going to be things by day six, seven, eight, nine that we’re like, ‘Man, all right, I need a little space, and I can’t get any right now.’ But we are a good crew.”
The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule stack stand at 322ft (98m) on the launchpad, and will split into stages at various points of its ascent. Nasa is confident it has solved the heat-shield issue that led to a nervy re-entry for Artemis I, and a helium leak that forced Artemis II back to its assembly building in February, and led to Nasa postponing the next launch attempt to April.
Nasa’s final weather briefing on Tuesday gave the launch an 80% chance of favorable conditions, and in the event of a scrubbed launch, Nasa has a window to try again on each of the following five nights.
This week at Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach, already busy with spring breakers, excitement for the launch is mounting, and hotel rooms are in short supply.
It is a feeling matched inside the Kennedy Space Center, where engineers and mission managers have been planning for years the next steps in the Artemis program. It was intended to provide a human moon landing at the beginning of the decade, but is running years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
“Nasa was established to undertake big, bold endeavors in air and space, to undertake the near impossible,” Isaacman told reporters earlier this year.
“The next up is America’s return to the lunar environment. What we learn from that mission is going to help enable America’s return to the lunar surface. When we arrive to the moon, we’re there to stay.”
