Artemis II heads to the moon with first crewed mission since 1972

America has returned to the moon with the Artemis II mission, the first crewed voyage to lunar orbit since 1972. The Orion spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral with a crew of three American astronauts and one Canadian astronaut. This mission marks significant historical firsts, with Christina Koch becoming the first woman to travel to the moon and Jeremy Hansen being the first Canadian astronaut to do so. The Artemis II mission is expected to last 10 days, during which the spacecraft will travel approximately 250,000 miles from Earth, setting a new record for human distance from our planet. This mission follows the successful Artemis I unmanned flight in 2022 and is part of a larger program aiming to establish a moon base and eventually send humans to Mars. The Artemis II mission's trajectory and objectives are similar to the Apollo 8 mission, which paved the way for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Despite a nearly 60-year hiatus in human deep space missions, the Artemis program is projected to be significantly less expensive than the Apollo program. The mission is expected to conclude with a splashdown off the coast of California.