Nasa’s first manned Moon mission in more than 50 years, which will take astronauts deeper into space than any human has gone before, blasted off on Wednesday evening from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The 98-metre rocket, Artemis II, taller than the Statue of Liberty, reached speeds of more than 28,000kph as it hurtled into space, blazing a trail of fire and smoke as it climbed, and eventually shedding its spent side boosters that provided extra thrust.
The Artemis II crew of Nasa astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen are poised for a nearly 10-day expedition around the Moon and back, taking them deeper into space than humans have ever gone.
After nearly three years of training, the crew is the first to fly in Nasa's Artemis programme, a multibillion-dollar series of missions designed in 2017 to build up a long-term US presence on the Moon over the next decade and beyond.
Cmdr Wiseman shouted to the crowd: “It’s a great day for us. It’s a great day for this team.”
The so-called lunar flyby will send the crew about 405,500km into space before returning to Earth.
The current record for the furthest spaceflight is about 400,000km, held by members of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, which was hit by technical problems.
As they pass beyond the far side of the Moon, the Orion module will lose communication with the Earth for up to 50 minutes.
While the astronauts will not touch down on the Moon, the Artemis II mission paves the way for a future lunar landing and also lays the foundation to send a crew to Mars.
The last time Nasa sent astronauts to the Moon was as part of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Nasa is seeking to return a crew to the lunar surface by 2028, before China does in about 2030.
