From Global News.

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.

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 with 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.

For more info, please go to https://globalnews.ca/news/11751220/artemis-ii-jeremy-hansen-jenni-gibbons-canada/

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