Fly me to the moon

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Up next, a trip to space.

Yesterday evening, four astronauts took off into space… making sure their systems work before circling around the moon. They won’t land on the moon this time, but still, it’s the first time humans have been out of low Earth orbit in more than 50 years.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Astronomer Danny Faulkner says this new mission is built practically from the ground up.

DANNY FAULKNER: We do everything differently today, and so back then, they didn't have computer chips for the most part, aboard spacecraft.

NASA wants to put people back on the moon by 2028… Faulkner says the whole plan sounds a lot like the Apollo Mission.

FAULKNER: It's sort of like the Apollo 8 back in 1968. That was a dress rehearsal, they were still developing the lunar excursion module, so they weren't ready to land on the moon, but they wanted to go there in order to kind of test the system. They were testing different parts of the system, and I suspect the same thing is going on with Artemis.

BROWN: WORLD’s Mary Muncy went to see the launch and brings us our story.

SOUND: [RIGHT BEFORE THE LAUNCH]

MARY MUNCY: Crowds jammed the beaches and roads near the Kennedy Space Center yesterday to watch the Orion Spacecraft hurtle into the sky.

As the final countdown started, everyone at Space View Park stood up.

Then:

SOUND: [CHEERS]

Lift off! The Orion streaked through the sky with a fireball that was hard to look at. The rumble hit us almost a minute later.

SOUND: [RUMBLE]

It turned and we lost sight of it after about two minutes.

AUDIO: [USA CHANT]

People from all over the world and country were packed along the coast. One man flew in from Ohio for the day. Others happened to be in town for spring break.

Jacquelyn Daigneault brought her two daughters to watch the launch.

AUDIO: Oh, that was amazing. That was just so awesome. You got a cool video? / Yeah, I got a cool video.

JACQUELYN: Can you believe there's humans in that?

Now the astronauts are checking the Orion’s systems and how it maneuvers in space. If all goes well, in a few days they’ll go 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the moon. That’s the farthest any human has gone into space.

They’ll be there when the sun hits the far side of the moon, so they’ll be able to get some of the first views it. NASA says when the astronauts look out the window, the moon will look about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length.

BARBAROSA: Space, it's pretty vast, as you can imagine.

Mattia Barbarosa is an Italian rocket scientist. He was here on business and just happened to catch the launch.

BARBAROSA: The International Space Station, where most of the human mission go nowadays, it's about 500 kilometers above our head, so about 300 miles away. When we are talking about the moon, we are talking about 300,000 miles.

The rocket is the size of a skyscraper. But the actual Orion capsule where the astronauts will live is about the size of a six person tent.

Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen boarded the Orion Spacecraft, and will be watching movies like Point Break when they’re not performing tests.

Their other job is scoping out a landing point for the next mission: putting humans back on the moon in 2028.

MUNCY: Do you want to go to space?

BARBAROSA: I'm working actively to build a rocket to do so.

Back on the other side of the park, Daigneault’s 10-year-old Clara has a different opinion:

CLARA: I don't want to die… It's predictless, like you don't, you can't predict what's gonna happen.

Her dad is an engineer working at NASA just across the river, so she watched the Artemis I launch, too.

CLARA: It was really nice. It looks like a fireball is going to space.

Her mom thinks it’s important for humanity to explore. It’s part of what makes us human.

AUDIO: I think it's really important for kids to be inspired. And this is really inspiring. It's the next generation of scientists, engineers, astronauts. That's what happened with the Apollo program, right? So here we are again, going to the moon.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy in Titusville, Florida.

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