NASA’S Orion spacecraft was yesterday orbiting the Moon halfway through its milestone test flight.
The capsule — with three mannequins instead of astronauts — fired up its engines on Friday.
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In the next few days of orbit, Orion is expected to reach a record 270,000 miles from Earth.
The mission is part of Nasa’s £4billion Artemis project, which is aiming for a 2025 lunar landing, the first since the Apollo 17 flight in 1972.
Last week, mission control in Houston briefly lost contact with Orion.
Nasa’s Jim Geffre said of the mission: “It’s about challenging ourselves to go farther, stay longer and push beyond the limits of what we’ve previously explored.”
The update comes after the Artemis 1 mission lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on, Wednesday, November 16 at 1.04am EST.
Nasa held a number of webcasts prior to the unmanned Artemis 1 launch, which served as the Space Launch System rocket’s first test flight with its Orion spacecraft.
