The Artemis II mission is officially headed to the Moon after NASA gave the go-ahead for its Orion spacecraft to leave Earth’s orbit for the next stage of its historic space mission.  Orion fired its main engine at 7:49 p.m. EST on Thursday, sending the four astronauts aboard out of Earth’s orbit and onto a trajectory toward the Moon. The crew is set to travel around the Moon and could venture farther than any humans have since the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.  “Nominal translunar injection burn complete. The Artemis II crew is officially on the way to the Moon,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “America is back in the business of sending astronauts to the Moon. This time, farther than ever before.” After Orion departed Earth’s orbit, NASA held a press conference for the four astronauts aboard the spacecraft. Commander Reid Wiseman, who is leading the mission, began by giving a shout-out to the astronauts’ families.  “There was a moment about an hour ago where Mission Control Houston reoriented our spacecraft as the sun was setting behind the Earth,” he said. “And I don’t know what we all expected to see in that moment, but you could see the entire globe from pole to pole. You could see Africa, Europe, and if you looked really close, you could see the Northern Lights. 
It was the most spectacular moment, and it paused all four of us in our tracks.” Wiseman said the astronauts had a busy first few days and that the magnitude of the mission was only starting to set in.  “We had been to the moon before in 1969, 1968 through 1972. It’s been a long time since we’ve been back. And I got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this. 
Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realizing the gravity of that,” he said.  The other astronauts on the mission are pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.  Koch said she hoped any milestone reached by the Artemis II crew would be surpassed by future missions.  “We think that the journey that we’ve been on, and all of our teams have been on with us, is so much more than just one number, but we also hope that that number just keeps being exceeded and exceeded by the future crews,” she said.  NASA has said that the mission has gone smoothly so far, apart from a brief loss of two-way communications between ground control and the crew due to an issue on the ground. Crew members are currently preparing a “lunar targeting plan,” which will guide their observations of the Moon’s surface during a six-hour window on Monday.