NASA Launches First Crewed Mission in Half Century
By Reuters | 01 Apr, 2026

Four astronauts lifted off Wednesday on NASA's 10-day Artemis II lunar swing mission as the race heats up to return boots to the lunar surface before China.

NASA's Artemis II lunar flyby mission, with the next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion crew capsule, sits on Pad 39B ahead of the launch of the Artemis II mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., March 31, 2026. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Four astronauts blasted off from Florida on Wednesday on NASA's Artemis II mission, a high‑stakes 10-day trip around the moon that marks the United States' boldest step yet toward returning humans to the lunar surface this decade before China's first crewed landing.

NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, topped with its Orion crew capsule, roared to life just before sunset at the agency's Kennedy Space Center to lift its first crew of three U.S. astronauts and a Canadian astronaut off Earth, a thunderous ascent leaving behind a towering column of thick white vapor.

The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts ‌Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen are poised for a nearly 10-day expedition around the moon and back, taking them deeper into space than humans have ever gone.

After nearly three years of training, they are the first group to fly in NASA's Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar series of missions created in 2017 to build up a long-term U.S. presence on the moon over the next decade and beyond.

The launch was a major milestone more than a decade in the making for the U.S. space agency's SLS rocket, handing its core contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman long-sought validation that the 30-story-tall system can safely loft humans into space, as NASA increasingly relies on newer, cheaper rockets from Elon Musk's SpaceX and others.

The crew's gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, built for NASA by Lockheed Martin, will separate from the SLS upper stage 3-1/2 hours into flight in Earth's orbit. The crew will then take manual control of Orion to test its steering and maneuverability around the detached upper stage, attempting the first of dozens of test objectives planned throughout the mission.

The Artemis II mission is a key early step in the flagship U.S. moon program, which is targeting its first crewed landing on the lunar surface in 2028 in the Artemis IV mission.

NASA is pressed to achieve that lunar landing - its first since the final Apollo mission in 1972 - as China expands its own lunar program with a planned astronaut landing as soon as 2030.

(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Bill Berkot and Jamie Freed)