Artemis I: NASA’s moonshot mission to ignite a new age of space. Six defining images

The launch of Artemis 1, NASA's first mission to the Moon since Apollo, is finally on. The rocket is blasting off from the Kennedy Space Center, Merritt Island, Florida after the initial launch was scrubbed following a technical issue with one of the four RS-25 engines. The take off is from the same pad used by the last Apollo mission 50 years ago. Kennedy Space Center is one of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) ten field centers.

Fifty-three years after humans first walked on the moon, NASA’s ambitious Artemis programme will return humans to the lunar surface, starting with an uncrewed launch of a massive new rocket today. The Artemis I mission will see the first flight of the megarocket Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the second flight of the Orion capsule. On top of 32-storey-high rocket is a new space capsule set to fly beyond the Moon and back again.

NASA’s next-generation SLS will send the uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a six-week test flight around the Moon and return safely back to Earth. The spacecraft’s crew capsule has about 30% more volume of space than the Apollo capsule and can sustain a future crew of four for up to 21 days during its initial missions to low lunar orbit, according to the space agency. The capsule will travel 1.3 million miles to orbit the moon.

The current mission is expected to last 42 days and will take the Orion spacecraft 450,000 kilometres from Earth before it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 10. The flight will include a number of carefully planned manoeuvres. Artemis I will journey to the farthest point a spacecraft designed for humans has ever ventured.

Artemis 1 is the first of a number of missions. NASA plans to send Artemis 2, the first crewed mission into space in 2024-2025. After establishing a Moon base, NASA hopes to send humans to Mars during the next decade.

“This is now the Artemis generation,” the Nasa administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Bill Nelson said recently. “We were in the Apollo generation. This is a new generation. This is a new type of astronaut.”