Letter from mission control: 4 astronauts soar toward moon ‘for all humanity’
I’ve never covered a rocket launch before, so I wasn’t sure when to exhale. About three minutes into the Artemis II mission, as the ship was about to enter space, I took inspiration from Reid Wiseman.
“We have a beautiful moonrise. We’re heading straight for it,” the mission commander said, his voice crackling in an auditorium at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Artemis II mission, which brings four astronauts to the Moon, is expected to last 10 days. For nine of those days, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, home to NASA’s Mission Control Center, will be the place to be. On launch day, while most cameras were focused on the liftoff from Cape Canaveral, Florida, work began here in a quieter — but crucial — way.
Why we wrote this
In the first attempt to orbit the Moon in more than half a century, four astronauts embarked on the Artemis II mission from Cape Canaveral. A Monitor reporter observed this historic step toward a lunar mission from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The Artemis missions represent NASA’s bold next step. A return to the Moon for the first time in half a century – this time with the intention of staying there for the long term. Artemis II will send a crew of four around the Moon and back, perhaps venturing further into space than any human in history. Artemis IV aims to land humans on the lunar surface in 2028. From there: a nuclear reactor, a lunar base, a deep space launch pad (first stop: Mars).
Many commentators this week have drawn parallels between Artemis II and Apollo 8, which orbited the Moon in 1968 before Apollo II’s moon landing the following year. The Johnson Space Center today seems to embody this theme of old and new, of legacy and reinvention.
From the outside, the complex doesn’t appear to have changed much since its heyday in the 1960s. The sprawling campus is still populated by squat, rectangular buildings of solid concrete, brutalist in their essence. Inside, however, the sleek Artemis program logo is everywhere, its futuristic font making you want to check that you’re still in the 21st century. The faces of the crew – Mr. Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen – stare back at you from photos and a life-size cardboard cutout. They seem ready to boldly leave.
I had traveled to Houston from my home base in Austin to report on Artemis II for the Monitor. Since becoming the Monitor’s Texas correspondent in 2016, I’ve always wanted to cover NASA (Houston is known as Space City after all). Artemis II seemed like the perfect opportunity to see history made in my own backyard. I enjoy reading about space technology and exploration in my free time, and while I’m not a PhD-level space enthusiast, I think I could understand the science enough (with help from experts) to cover the mission professionally.
With the likely exception of Building 30 – which houses the Mission Control Center and was closed to journalists on Wednesday – the JSC remained quiet for most of the day. Around 4:30 p.m. local time, a half-mile from Building 30, NASA employees and journalists began moving toward Teague Auditorium, where a live broadcast from the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was shown on a screen next to an empty podium.
A dozen staff and journalists, as well as three television film crews, gathered in the large auditorium. 5:14 p.m. came and went without the countdown starting, but there was a slight delay before the seconds started ticking.
If the crew was nervous, they didn’t let it be known. As the launch teams completed their final checks and issued their respective iconic “let’s launch” proclamations, Mr. Hansen, Canada’s first astronaut on a lunar mission, added a touch of originality. “We are reaching out to all humanity,” he said.
From my perch in Houston, the Cape Canaveral launch pad looked magnificent. The imposing Space Launch System rocket was framed by a clear blue sky and capped with a dot of white: the Orion spacecraft (nicknamed “Integrity” by the crew), their home for the next 10 days.
Back at Teague Auditorium, at T-1:30, phones were taken out of pockets. The cameras are pointed at the screen and recording. A NASA launch commentator told viewers that the “four brave explorers” were 248,000 miles from the Moon and about to pilot “the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built.”
The announcer counts down from 10, then a burst of light, a roar of belching, and Artemis II rides a ball of fire high into the blue sky. The small crowd in the auditorium shouts and applauds. Tension still hangs in the air as the fireball dissipates in a thick plume of white smoke billowing from behind the rocket. Is everyone safe? Finally, a voice crackles on the radio, delivering space jargon that makes it sound like everything is fine, but leaves me perplexed.
“Integrity,” Mr. Wiseman said, “converged guidance, nominal performance, RCS-ready upper stage,” he said.
Three minutes and 50 seconds into the mission, the crew crossed the boundary of space, the announcer proclaimed. Eight minutes and two seconds into the mission, the main engine shut down (also known as the moment when the main booster rockets break away and drift into space). The crowd roared as a camera showed the rocket — and what appeared to be a cloud of shimmering debris — flying away.
Twenty-three minutes into the mission, the Artemis II crew soared about 600 miles above Earth, traveling at more than 16,000 miles per hour. From there, the astronauts will circle the Earth twice, testing Orion’s systems, before beginning a roughly four-day journey to the Moon.
Hard numbers and funny statistics swirl around my head. The record for traveling farthest from Earth is 248,655 miles, which Artemis II could beat if it follows a certain trajectory. The Orion capsule is about the size of two minivans. The lunar flyby will take place with the ship approximately 4,000 miles above the lunar surface. For astronauts, the moon will be about the size of a basketball in your outstretched hand.
Space exploration is complicated. But there are ways to make it understandable. And it’s a breeze to make it exciting. At Cape Canaveral, astronaut Nichole Ayers wiped tears from her eyes minutes after launch. A NASA astronaut since 2022, she participated in the fifth all-female spacewalk to the International Space Station. Ms. Koch attended the premiere in 2019.
Ms. Ayers considers the four members of the Artemis II crew to be her friends, she said during NASA’s live coverage, after they faded out of sight and into history.
“What a way to welcome the Artemis generation,” she added.
