The real journey of Artemis 2 to the Moon finally began this Friday at 1:50 a.m. Spanish peninsular time, with the last great roar of the Orion spacecraft’s engines. More than 25 hours had passed after takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA), when the Orion spacecraft executed the so-called translunar injection maneuver and propelled itself towards its destination: the far side of the Moon.
According to what the mission control center told the astronauts after completing the push, “preliminary reports indicate that the maneuver has been successful.” Minutes later, the final confirmation came through the NASA administrator: “The Artemis 2 crew is officially on its way to the Moon. The United States is sending astronauts to the Moon again. This time, further than ever,”
At the beginning of its second day of mission, after completing two orbits around the Earth, the spacecraft was once again just 185 kilometers from its surface. Then, it moved its solar panels away from the engines and shot out with strong acceleration to enter a space designed with very high precision by NASA so that the capsule would return on its own—without having to propel itself again—and complete its mission within eight days.
If in the four days there and four days back of this space trip there are no incidents – like the one it suffered -, this will be the final impulse that the ship will have given in the rest of the Artemis 2 mission. The 5 minutes and 50 seconds in a row during which the main engine of the Orion service module was turned on – with a declared thrust of almost 27,000 newtons – would serve, on Earth, to accelerate an SUV category car from 0 to more than 12,000 kilometers per hour. In the vacuum of space, this enormous power has served to tear Orion from Earth’s orbit and send it towards the Moon
All that momentum, applied at the right time and in the exact direction following the millimeter calculations of the engineers of the Artemis 2 mission, has put the ship on a course towards the Moon. And it will be a very special path, in the shape of an 8, so that when the ship enters the sphere of gravitational attraction of the Moon,
The result will be that, without maneuvering or propelling again, the capsule with Artemis 2 will circle the Moon—flying over its far side at more than 7,400 kilometers above sea level—and will return home, attracted by the Earth’s gravity. This is how a free return trajectory works, which is the simplest and safest way for humanity to visit another world.
In the Apollo missions, this trajectory was always available in the background, as insurance to be able to return in case of problems, as happened in the case of Apollo 13 after an explosion in the ship and a few epic hours in which the crew executed an emergency solution agreed upon with the NASA mission control center in Houston (USA).
This time, Houston had multiple scenarios prepared to bring the astronauts home. In the event that the main engine did not propel the ship correctly and could not reach the Moon, the technical managers of the mission clarified that several series of auxiliary engines could always be used to turn the ship and return to Earth.
The success of the translunar injection maneuver, carried out by the European part of the Orion spacecraft—the service module designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) and manufactured by the Airbus company—symbolizes the international cooperation component of the Artemis Program, which, while the president of the United States, Donald Trump, covers this space feat with supremacist nationalism. Before the launch of Artemis 2, “We are winning in space, on Earth, and everywhere in between […] Nobody comes close to us.”
