LIVEUpdated Nov. 16, 2022, 11:19 a.m.
Live Updates: NASA’s Artemis Rocket Launches Toward Moon on Mighty Columns of Flame.
NASA’s majestic new rocket soared into space for the first time in the early hours of Wednesday, lighting up the night sky and accelerating on a journey that will take an astronaut-less capsule around the moon and back.
This flight, evoking the bygone Apollo era, is a crucial test for NASA’s Artemis program that aims to put astronauts, after five decades of loitering in low-Earth orbit, back on the moon.
“We are all part of something incredibly special,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, said to her team at the Kennedy Space Center after the launch. “The first launch of Artemis. The first step in returning our country to the moon and on to Mars.”For NASA, the mission ushers in a new era of lunar exploration, one that seeks to unravel scientific mysteries in the shadows of craters in the polar regions, test technologies for dreamed-of journeys to Mars and spur private enterprise to chase new entrepreneurial frontiers farther out in the solar system.At 1:47 a.m. Eastern time, the four engines on the rocket’s core stage ignited, along with two skinnier side boosters, As the countdown hit zero, clamps holding the rocket down let go, and the vehicle slipped Earth’s bonds
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