“Reed, Victor, Christina and Jeremy, you will take with you on this historic mission the heart of this Artemis team, the courageous spirit of the American people and our partners around the world, and the hopes and dreams of a new generation,” said Launch Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson.
“Good luck, Divine Speed, Artemis II. Let’s go,” she added.
A few hours after liftoff, the SLS rocket’s upper stage successfully separated from the Lockheed Martin-built Orion capsule and its propulsion module. The crew then began working on an initial test objective: manually steering the spacecraft around the upper stage to demonstrate its mobility if its default automatic controls ever fail.
Wednesday’s launch was a major milestone in more than a decade of construction of the U.S. space agency’s SLS rocket, which left its prime contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman long seeking confirmation that the launch system was ready to safely carry humans into space. NASA has increasingly relied on new, cheaper rockets from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others to send astronauts to low Earth orbit.
The success of the Artemis II flight so far has provided positive talking points for the space agency, which lost about 20 percent of its workforce last year under the Trump administration’s federal cutback efforts.