KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fl. - Artemis II officially launched around 6:35 p.m. tonight, sending four astronauts in the Orion spacecraft into outer space on a path around the moon.
This crewed flight to the moon is the first in more than 50 years. The mission could also travel farther from Earth than any human has before.
The crew includes NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
(NASA)
Artemis II is making history in many ways, with pilot Glover being the first Black person to go to the moon, specialist Koch the first woman, and specialist Hansen the first Canadian.
If all goes as planned, the astronauts will go a little more than 4,000 miles further than the Apollo 13 crew, back in 1970.
Less than two hours before scheduled launch, NASA says they fixed an issue with the flight termination system.
Then, with less than an hour before launch, they cleared a battery issues with the Orion capsule's launch abort system, according to NASA, and officials said things were a go for launch.
(NASA)
Artemis II is intended as a test flight to check out systems and equipment to lay the groundwork for future missions to land astronauts on the moon, hopefully in 2028.
Meanwhile, here on Delmarva, NASA's Wallops Flight Facility and Visitor Center supported - and celebrated - the launch today. Range teams at Wallops are tracking the flight path, and the visitor center threw a watch party in their auditorium. The watch party was sold out.
One attendee told us how excited they were about the Artemis II mission. "Even though we're not going to land there, but just to have humans go around it again and to do it for the first time in 50 years and see with their own eyes and get new images and pictures and the astronauts even having cell phones with them this time is pretty cool," says Micah Pieczarka.