About four hours before blastoff, crews had to deal with a flurry of issues including a leaky fuel valve. Wednesday's launch was not without its own drama. 3 attempts were aborted - after 10 weeks beset by technical mishaps, back-to-back hurricanes and two excursions trundling the spacecraft out of its hangar to the launch pad. Liftoff came on the third try at launching the multibillion-dollar rocket - Aug. And it was quite a sight,' Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin told a post-launch NASA briefing, using words from biblical scripture.Īside from some minor instrument issues, 'this system is performing exactly as we intended it to,' Sarafin said. 'Today, we got to witness the world's most powerful rocket take the Earth by its edges and shake the wicked out of it. The capsule is expected to splash down at sea on Dec. The three-week Artemis I mission entails a 25-day Orion flight bringing the capsule to within about 60 miles (97 km) of the lunar surface before flying about 40,000 miles (64,400 km) beyond the moon and looping back to Earth. About 90 minutes later, the rocket's upper stage propelled the Orion capsule out of Earth orbit and on its trajectory to the moon, NASA said. EST (0647 GMT), piercing the blackness over Cape Canaveral with a reddish-orange tail of fire as crowds of spectators cheered and screamed. The 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 1:47 a.m. space agency's much-delayed and highly anticipated launch from Florida kicked off Apollo's successor program, Artemis, aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establishing a sustainable base there as a stepping stone to future human exploration of Mars. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Nov 16 (Reuters) - With a dash of launch-pad heroics and 8.8 million pounds (4 million kg) of thrust, NASA's colossal new rocket soared into space for the first time early on Wednesday, sending a next-generation capsule on a crewless voyage around the moon and back 50 years after the final Apollo lunar mission.

Rocketship rocketship