JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Juana Summers.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And I'm Scott Detrow. Right now, the crew of Artemis II is orbiting Earth. NASA's first mission back to the moon in half a century had faced delay after delay, but this evening, liftoff proceeded without a hitch. We talked to NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce at the Kennedy Space Center just as the spacecraft lifted off.
Nell, tell me what you're seeing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROCKET FLYING)
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: The rocket is just arcing up into the sky. There's a tremendous noise and just a bright, bright star-like streaking star in the sky as it goes up and up. The sound was, like, physical. You could feel your body shaking. And there's a long, straight cloud, white cloud coming down from the rocket, which is still very visible high up in the blue sky.
There's four astronauts on board. And it's amazing to think that they're on top of this thing, and it's just going up and up and up, and we can still hear it. It's like a very loud flag flapping sound. And all eyes are on this thing. It's up. We can still see the glowing core of the engine. It's very hard to see the rocket at this point.
DETROW: Yeah.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's just the fire that we're seeing.
DETROW: I've got the monitor on. And it's making its way through the blue skies above Florida. This is the first mission back toward the moon in more than half a century. They're not going to land on the moon. But Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, four astronauts are going to circle the moon. And this is the closest NASA has gotten to the moon since the glory days of Apollo. And, Nell, this is something that has been delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed. And you are watching them make their way to the moon.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, there may have been delays in the past, but not today. Everything went incredibly smoothly to the countdown. Everyone here is still watching. We can see the rocket way up high. Now it just looks like a pin prick of light, but you can still see the long white cloud coming out from beneath it.
(CHEERING)
GREENFIELDBOYCE: People are cheering. You hear them in the background. Everybody is closely watching their flight up to Earth's orbit, which is going to take about eight minutes to get them up there. And then they'll circle the Earth for a while and check things out before they decide whether they're going to actually continue on to the moon.
DETROW: And, Nell, yeah, tell me more about that. We're about two minutes into the launch. And from what we can see, the NASA feed just cut away from the image of the rockets, so we can't see for sure right now. It looks like the booster rockets just separated.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yeah, I think I see them in the sky coming. And everybody here is sort of trying to keep one eye on what's happening in the sky and one eye on what's happening in their monitors and the NASA feed. But, yeah, it's got to get up to space. We're waiting for main engine cutoff, which is when we'll know that it's safely in Earth's orbit.
DETROW: OK. So as we wait for that, tell me a bit about what happens next. You briefly mentioned it before. They're going to make their way into orbit. Then they're going to orbit the Earth for a little bit before they decide whether or not to proceed to the moon. What happens there?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yeah, that's correct. So this is the first launch of the Orion capsule with people on board. There was another launch a few years ago that was testing out this capsule system without a crew. But now that they've got people on board, they really want to put the capsule through its paces. So the crew is going to...
DETROW: Oh, wow.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: ...Do some maneuvers. Once it separates from the upper stage of the rocket, they're going to do some practice flying around a little bit to get ready for future rendezvous maneuvers they'll have to do as part of their, you know, sort of extended lunar plan.
DETROW: Yeah.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And they're going to check everything out. They're going to check out the life support systems, all the navigation, propulsion, everything like that. And only if everything is good, on flight Day 2, they'll do this special burn of their propulsion system that will send them out to the moon.
DETROW: So the feed from NASA just showed a quick glimpse from a camera on the spacecraft, the Orion spacecraft. And you could see - I know there's a technical term, but it looks to me like they're in space, even if they're not technically in space yet. You can see the Earth down below. You can see the dark sky above them.
From that last shot, it seemed like everything was moving according to pace. From down below, you could see the booster rockets falling away and everything else. And it looks to me like you can see kind of that clear cloud of the exhaust from the rocket in front of you kind of edging through the sky like a big lightning bolt. Or is that the best way to say it? What are you seeing now?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yeah, it's kind of starting to dissipate.
DETROW: OK.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And the crowds are all kind of, like, heading back to the buildings. The show here is kind of over.
DETROW: Yeah.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: And now the main show goes to all the cameras. So it's amazing the kind of video we can get from spaceships these days. And everybody is going to be closely watching every sort of, like, bit on the checklist for this mission. But honestly, this has been a day of just good progress all day for NASA. Everything seemed sort of charmed, you know? The countdown, the weather, everything has gone just as NASA had been hoping and waiting for, really, for a long time. Some people at NASA have been waiting, you know, years, like, decades for this mission. It's a big deal.
DETROW: Yeah. How close are they going to get to the moon? Assuming everything goes well, assuming they proceed to that main phase of the mission, how close are they going to get?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, they're not going to land. That's something that, you know, has got to be made clear. They're only going to fly by. And how close they're going to come, it's going to be several thousand miles from the surface of the moon. So that sounds, you know, kind of far. But they'll be a lot closer than us (laughter).
DETROW: For sure.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The Earth is over 200,000 miles from the moon. And from their perspective, the moon is going to look really big. It's going to look like, you know, if you were holding out your arm, and in your hand, you were holding a basketball. I mean, that's kind of how big the moon would loom in their windows. And then, of course, you know, beyond that, they'll see the tiny Earth, the little blue marble kind of thing.
DETROW: Yeah.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Which humans haven't seen it like that in person since the days of Apollo.
DETROW: And that was such a monumental breakthrough to see that first image of the entire Earth around the moon. And I think everyone's looking forward to seeing the images that come back from Artemis II, if they do make it there. Walk me through what happens beyond that, how this fits into the ultimate goal of the Artemis program and NASA's next two years of plans, which actually recently just changed again. That's been something that's shifted a lot.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Yeah, yeah. NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman, has just kind of, you know, shaken up the Artemis architecture. They had been planning to build kind of a small space station in orbit around the moon. And now he's said they're going to put that on hold and pursue other options to try to get people to land there earlier. NASA wants to build a whole lunar base.
They want to have a sort of continuous human presence on the moon in the same way that we have people living, you know, on bases in Antarctica. And so there's a lot that has to happen for that to become reality. Of course, the main one is just being able to land on the moon again, and for that, you need a lander. And NASA has not yet finished development of a moon lander. That's a big, big thing that needs to happen for them to make progress in this whole program.
DETROW: The Artemis II crew is seven minutes and 10 seconds into its mission. And, Nell, you and I have a minute left to talk. And in that meantime, tell me a little bit about the crew because there are a lot of firsts here, including the first Canadian, the first woman and the first person of color to go this far into space.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's right. Jeremy Hansen is the Canadian Space Agency astronaut. He'll be the first non-American to travel to the moon if they go out there. There's Reid Wiseman, who's a NASA astronaut who's been on the International Space Station. Victor Glover, who will be the first Black American to travel to the moon. And Christina Koch, who will be the first woman to travel to the moon. So it's a lot of firsts, and so it's historic in that way. But really, for NASA, this is the start of something that they hope will be, you know, as momentous in the history books as the Apollo program was back in the 1960s and 1970s.
DETROW: That is NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce watching a live rocket launch with us from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Thank you so much.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRIAN BURROWS "CLAIRE DE LUNE (REMIX)") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
