Orion fires engines and is now on its way around the Moon
After reviewing the operation of Orion capsule during its first day in orbit, the NASA Artemis-2 management team approved sending the spacecraft to the Moon.
The burn occurred at 7:49 Eastern. The live stream of that burn is embedded below.
At this moment NASA and the crew are committed. No matter what happens, they cannot return to Earth any earlier than about nine days from now. And when they return, they will have to do a direct dive into the atmosphere, heading to splashdown. The Orion heat shield at that point must work.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
After reviewing the operation of Orion capsule during its first day in orbit, the NASA Artemis-2 management team approved sending the spacecraft to the Moon.
The burn occurred at 7:49 Eastern. The live stream of that burn is embedded below.
At this moment NASA and the crew are committed. No matter what happens, they cannot return to Earth any earlier than about nine days from now. And when they return, they will have to do a direct dive into the atmosphere, heading to splashdown. The Orion heat shield at that point must work.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Curiously, there was no equivalent to Artemis 2 in the Apollo program. A friend told me it was “just like” Apollo 8, but I corrected her that while that mission was indeed also launched into a free-return trajectory, when it was behind the moon, it fired its engine retropropulsively and entered a low lunar orbit. After multiple orbits, it again fired its engine to leave lunar orbit and return to Earth.
This emphasizes the relatively small capacity of the Artemis engine, which does not need to propel the stages required to enter low lunar orbit, descend to the surface, ascend again, and leave lunar orbit.
To me this highlights the folly (if not outright deception) of NASA defining a spacecraft that could only enter a distant lunar orbit even when fully developed, and relied on an orbiting gateway and a lander to actually reach the surface of the moon!
The failure / folly of designing a heavy lift launch vehicle that was not capable of supporting a moon landing has been discussed to some extent in this forum, but can anyone pinpoint exactly when and how this fateful decision was made and set in place? Congress certainly must have played a role, but whose siren song was it responding to?
PS — This is not so much trying to play a blame game as attempting to understand the actual history of this. How, again, was this costly decision made, and what was the rationale for it?
RVD – The other similar trajectory would be Apollo 13. Neither 8 nor 13 did a day in LEO before going to the moon. All the Apollo landing missions mirrored Apollo 8 in that they settled into lunar orbit for a few days. Cheers –
Could it have had anything to do with the ill-conceived Lunar Gateway? IIRC, the original concept was to get the astronauts there, and thence to the surface.
Just now an astronaut called down to Houston to ask what the location of the electric razor is, within the spacecraft.
Maybe I’m a little too critical but somehow I don’t think that would be a call you would have heard from Borman, Lovell or Anders.
Saville: You are quite right. Lovell and Anders knew that if they were to ask such a stupid question, even privately, Borman the commander would have been very very pissed, and rightly so. Borman demanded they know this stuff before launch, and Lovell and Anders were quite okay with that.
Besides, the Apollo 8 crew had a private line they could use for such stuff, which they used for private medical questions.
A good perspective
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vo3Dy6Zd30g
The obvious answer to an electric razor is that you don’t need one. You grow that space beard, big and proud.
Jeff Wright,
Well, it’s a perspective and probably yours as well. But if this guy thinks the future of space exploration is going to stay mostly in NASA’s wheelhouse he’s part of what Rand Simberg calls the Apollo Cargo Cult. What Musk does over the next decade is going to dwarf what NASA will be able to do over that same interval. Even perpetual-player-of-catch-up-football Jeff Bezos will probably excel NASA over the next ten years. Both Musk and Bezos will be selling rides to NASA, but they’ll have pecuniary reasons of their own to be doing a whole lot more in addition. That’s just the way things are going to be going forward.
Nor will Musk and Bezos be alone as private sector cowboys on the High Frontier, they’ll just be first.
Richard M, et al,
About the electric razor. I find it fascinating that there even is such a thing on Orion. I should think errant bits of beard stubble would constitute hazards to both equipment and respiration in zero-G, but perhaps prior experience on ISS has resulted in a zero-G shaver that polices up its own output with a small built-in vacuum cleaner. As someone who has sported a beard since high school graduation, I’ll confess that outer space tonsorial technology has never been exactly top-of-mind with me.
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “Lovell and Anders knew that if they were to ask such a stupid question, even privately, Borman the commander would have been very very pissed, and rightly so. Borman demanded they know this stuff before launch, and Lovell and Anders were quite okay with that.”
If no one onboard Artemis II knew the answer to this question, we have to wonder what other training from NASA was deficient.
Keeping a record of the location of everything on the spacecraft is one of the jobs at NASA. Has NASA become complacent with ISS, having crews phone home in order to find things? This seems to be standard operating procedure with ISS, and maybe it has carried over to all the NASA-manned spacecraft in the pat fifteen years.
I can’t speak to NASA training, but there are reasonable explanations. It’s a brand-new spacecraft with hundreds of items packed aboard, with scores of people involved in said storage. Grooming tools were probably not a crew training emphasis the last several weeks, and it may be that some things were relocated. For what this mission costs, I’d rather a professional ask a question, than spend time looking.
I, too, was mortified at the radio ‘discipline’. It was casual even by general aviation standards, and not as professional as one might expect from people flying a craft on its first crewed mission. I know that a lot of very smart people worked long hours to make this vehicle work, but the public-facing side of the mission feels sloppy and incompetent.
“We have eight days for everyone on Earth to get a Planet of the Apes costume so we can do something hilarious when the Artemis II astronauts return.”
https://t.ly/mdGs_
Dick Eagleson: I enjoyed the dig he made at Elon Musk. Par for the course for Australians and Europeans these days-no understanding of how things get built, how progress gets made, that NASA is increasingly reliant on SpaceX (and would be even if it had a much bigger budget than it does now), how little Artemis II is accomplishing, and apparently no idea that lowering the price to get to space means more and more people can do their own things unrelated to Musk and Bezos. I’m reminded of a European I once encountered saying how proud they were of ESA because it was a program for the people, while looking down on SpaceX, and he did not remotely care that SpaceX was launching more hardware for more people in a month than ESA was doing in a year. All that mattered was that it was state-run. The ordinary people can’t buy access? Who cares?
One little aside: This morning, the Artemis II astronauts were treated to a wake up audio message from Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke, who happened to fly part of his mission on a spacecraft named Orion. I thought that was nice.
Audio of Duke’s message at the link:
https://x.com/i/status/2040830806063468807
To Milt,
After MSFC’s Saturn V was killed, America was sold a bill of goods about this tiled monstrosity that took over the Saturn pads and how these tiled beasts were going to be re-usable this and more affordable that.
And here we are again.
I and others hated that the Saturns were killed, but Shuttle-derived heavy lift launch vehicles (SD-HLLVs) was what we had tooling for. The Air Farce wanted to hang their EELV albatross on NASA, and that was madness. Dan Golden handed out Delta IIs to JPL and everyone wanted to kill Marshall to get its budget—the outfit that just handed America this Artemis II victory.
Before it was SLS, it was called other things like ALS/NLS, MAGNUM/BMDO Launcher….DIRECT…CaLV—-but the most powerful iteration seriously conceived was Ares V, which Obama killed.
The thing you have to understand is that people who hate the idea of NASA building rockets, like Mr. Zimmerman himself, certainly didn’t help things either.
Now you could get a single shot vehicle:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=38069.0
The thing you need to understand, Milt, is that of all space advocates, those trying to kill Saturn replacements have had it the hardest.
JPL would loved to have seen Marshall killed so they could cover Mars with bomb disposal robots launched by endless Delta IIs.
And Artemis II would not have existed.
There were suborbital types who wanted to raid MSFC budgets, EELV hucksters, hate-government/hate NASA types.
I am surprised we even got this far.
But even Berger at Ars is softening his stance:
https://arstechnica.com/features/2026/03/this-is-my-third-orion-launch-but-it-feels-totally-different/
Orion has flown 3 times, despite all the haters. Starship is delayed again, as the Arty III SLS core is already at Florida. Lunar Starship doesn’t exist yet to make a landing.
SpaceX fans have turned a lot of websites into echo chambers—but the worm is turning:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vo3Dy6Zd30g
Milt,
A short summary: the SLS was created circa 2010 by Congress from the RAC studies, partly to keep the Shuttle workforce employed after it wound down, partly to snub Obama for canceling Constellation, and partly to burnish the power bases of the Senators and Congressmen/women who pushed hardest for its creation, such as Shelby of Alabama, and Barbara Mikulski from Maryland. They wanted to reward the major contractors who have had a close relationship with the government for decades; employ people in their home districts; and get their own chances of reelection increased. That’s why the SLS was signed into law with no real mission, and only abortive attempts at giving it one until Trump was first elected and created the Artemis Program.
Jeff Wright,
Berger isn’t softening his stance with the SLS, but with NASA’s direction. To quote:
1. Starship vs. SLS is not remotely comparable to Saturn V vs. Shuttle, and the Saturn V was canceled for good reasons, just as the SLS is being wound down for good reasons. Given that the first external price we’ve seen for a single Starship launch is $90 million, compared to the $4.1 billion an SLS/Orion launch demands, the ’tiled beast’ is absolutely more affordable. NASA could buy 45 Starship launches for the cost of a single SLS/Orion flight (and it’s already been more reusable, given the reuse of Booster 14 for Flight Test 9).
2. It does not matter if Saturn V-replacement advocates have ‘had it the hardest.’ No one gets a pass from criticism. Everyone has to justify their position-including people who support SpaceX.
3. Orion has flown three times with a program cost of over $31 bllion to date, more than double what the Starship program has cost SpaceX. That’s nothing to be proud of.
3a. Lunar Starship does in fact exist. That it isn’t mounted on a booster at the pad yet does not contradict me.
4. Ongoing excitement for all the changes SpaceX has wrought in the space sector, and the huge number of people who are interested in the company and its plans, do not an echo chamber make.
He’s going to have to launch something besides the SpaceX version of sleepy Delta II to get the old mojo back.
Hey Elon!
Rammer Jammer
Jeff Wright,
Lol. What a silly comment.