Lyndon Blake

Now to do that, the rocket's engine had to burn for more than five minutes and have enough power to move 6,000 pounds away from the Earth's gravity.

So that's gonna wake up the astronauts a little bit.

So it'll be about four more days for the Artemis II mission to get to the moon before the space crew heads back to Earth.

So the four astronauts on board are NASA astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first people to launch toward the moon since Apollo 17 mission back in 1972.

And as I mentioned, they might not be feeling too good right now because the first few days of this mission are the toughest on their body, and they're having to be waking up a lot for these engine fires.

The engine had to fire on Thursday, then fire again Thursday night to get them on the right trajectory to get to the moon.

So it was a lot of science up there

to make sure that rocket ship can safely go thousands and thousands of miles away.

So they're going to cruise for the next few days.

But then on day five, Orion will enter the moon's gravitational sphere of influence, but they're not going to actually enter lunar orbit.

Then around day six, the Artemis II crew will go to the far side of the moon, and that's going to be briefly outside of radio contact with Earth.

So there's a chance this weekend that this crew could break the record for the furthest anyone has traveled from Earth, which was previously set back in 1970 by the crew of Apollo 13.

So they're going to spend day six of the mission making naked eye observations of the moon, taking photos of the moon, which at closest approach will appear as large as a basketball held at arm's length.

So that is pretty neat.

Then they're going to prep for their return to Earth, and things get really spicy.

That includes the rocket ship heating up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere to 3,000 degrees on day 10.

One of the coolest parts, once they get back in the Earth's atmosphere, the astronauts get to parachute.

They're going to go about 17 miles per hour as they travel back down and splash into the Pacific Ocean.

And once they splash and come back up, then that's when you can officially call the mission a success.

Yeah, it's going to be something really cool.