The Artemis II mission is now headed back toward Earth, with four astronauts having soared around the far side of the moon on an unprecedented path that reached deeper into space than any human has traveled before.The journey — crewed by NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — marks the first time humans have left Earth orbit since 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission. And with Glover, Koch and Hansen aboard, the it also represents the first time a Black astronaut, a woman astronaut and a non-American astronaut, respectively, have ventured this far.“Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of, and it’s your hopes for the future that carry us now on this journey around the moon,” Hansen said Thursday.AdvertisementAdvertisementOrion is now on what’s called a “free return trajectory.” That’s spaceflight parlance for a slingshot trip: Because of orbital dynamics and the moon’s gravity, even if Orion had never fired its engine again, the capsule would have still swung around the moon and headed back to Earth.The mission, which took off at 6:35 p.m. ET Wednesday, marks the inaugural crewed flight of NASA’s Artemis program — a long-term plan to return humans to the moon and eventually establish a lunar settlement. After lifting off atop a towering Space Launch System rocket, the astronauts immediately began putting Orion through its paces, including taking their Orion spacecraft for a 70-minute manual test-drive called a “proximity operations demonstration.”For several more days, the crew members will live, eat, sleep, work out and carry out science experiments inside the campervan-size space of Orion. All the while, they’ll face a multitude of risks that are inherent to a deep-space mission.Here’s what has hap …
