Chris Hadfield

You can't just stop and turn around and come back.

You've got to coast all the way to the moon, sling around the moon using its gravity, and then come back.

Shameful that licensed professionals would be involved in this.

A day after launch, the four astronauts of Artemis II are in a high Earth orbit checking out systems ahead of firing their main engine for about six minutes to send the Orion spacecraft on a path around the moon.

Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield says this engine burn, called translunar injection, is critical for the rest of the mission.

When Artemis 2 passes the far side of the moon next week, the astronauts are expected to be farther from Earth than any human has gone before, breaking the record currently held by the three astronauts of the 1970 Apollo 13 mission.

Access.

There are amazing times in history, Whitney, where we collectively as a species invent something new that opens up whole new opportunities for humanity.

Think about, you know, when we first harnessed fire or when someone built the first raft to cross, I don't know, the Red Sea or when we started mining.

domesticating horses and allowed ourselves to travel quickly.

Or when the first train was invented, you know, late 1700s, early 1800s.

And then the airplane and the car, all of those things changed not only how we could move around, but then where we could go to.

And spaceflight has been around now for 60 years, but we're in a revolution right now of reusable spaceship design, which is drastically dropping the cost, which then increases the access for everybody.

And right now, it's possible to just buy a ticket and go to space for the price of a luxury car.

And luxury cars are expensive.

but there are a lot of people buying luxury cars too.

So it's just a kind of a revolutionary time in starting to leave earth in amongst all the scientific and explorative stuff going on.

And I find it all really inspiring and exciting and also kind of delightful based on what I've done my whole life.

When I was born, and I'm by no means the oldest man in the world, no one had gone to space.

Like when I was just learning to walk, that's when Yuri Gagarin and then a month later Al Shepard and then everybody that followed started going to space.