Travel to space has become commonplace. Over the last three decades, nearly 300 people have flown to and from the International Space Station, some of them residing there for months at a time. In the last several years, the rocket startup Blue Origin has launched a series of day trips just over the threshold into space — high-end carnival rides for celebrities including Katy Perry, Gayle King and William Shatner.
The imminent Artemis II lunar mission is different.
NASA’s spaceflight, scheduled to lift off Wednesday evening, will carry four astronauts on a round-trip all the way to the moon, a thousand times farther away than the space station, and they’ll have to break free from Earth’s gravity to do so. It’s a trip that only two dozen humans have ever taken, and the last time it happened was in 1972.
Artemis II’s Orion spacecraft will also take its four astronauts farther than any
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