NASA says the Artemis II mission continues to go according to plan, with its four-person crew seemingly euphoric as they know they're now truly en route to the moon.
On Thursday evening, when their spacecraft was passing about 115 miles above Earth, one of its engines fired for 5 minutes and 50 seconds.
This much-anticipated "translunar injection burn" broke the crew capsule out of its orbit around the planet and sent it on a journey toward the moon that no one has made in more than a half-century.
"I gotta tell you, there is nothing normal about this. Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a Herculean effort, and we are now just realizing the gravity of that," said mission commander Reid Wiseman, in a downlink from the spacecraft a few hours after the lunar injection burn.
"We are definitely, 100% on our way to the moon," said Wiseman, who said the crew just looked at each other in disbelief after the burn was complete. "This is unbelievable, that we can put our minds to something and pull it off. This is an unbelievable technical accomplishment."
The new trajectory will take advantage of the moon's gravity to slingshot the capsule around the back of the moon and send it home, with the astronauts splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, Calif., in about eight days.
"The crew is feeling pretty good up here, on our way to the moon," said Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen as he spoke to Mission Control in Houston, just minutes after the completion of this critical maneuver.
"Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of," Hansen said, noting the efforts of all the people around the world who had persevered to make Artemis II possible. "It's your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon."
So far in space, the astronauts have had to deal with various small glitches, but nothing major.
"Things are going really well," says NASA's Lori Glaze. "I think we couldn't be more pleased with how well things are going. Right now we're not tracking any issues of concern."
A slight problem with the water dispensing system had the astronauts bagging water as a precautionary measure in case of a subsequent failure, just before the engine burn that changed their trajectory and sent them moon-bound.
The crew also got a cabin pressurization leak warning before the critical burn, but controllers on the ground said the pressure and temperature of their capsule were stable, so this alarm did not interfere with the plan to go to the moon.
"That was a false indication," explained Judd Frieling, an Artemis flight director, in a press briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We quickly knew that there was no leak."
Still, Hansen said the alarm definitely got the crew's attention, as the astronauts wondered whether leaking cabin air would force them to cut their mission short and figure out how to get home in a day or less, instead of going to the moon. "Luckily, it was just a little anomaly," he said. "Houston helped us out."
Part of this mission is figuring out how to configure the capsule and its various systems for a flight with people on board, officials said, so that false alarms don't become a distraction as the astronauts go where no one has gone since the Apollo program in the 1970s.
"This is still a test flight," said Glaze. But after the critical burn of the spacecraft's engine, she said, "the laws of orbital mechanics are going to carry our crew to the moon, around the far side, and back to Earth."
Copyright 2026 NPR
