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The four Artemis astronauts have fired up their spacecraft’s engine to break away from Earth’s orbit and zoomed towards the moon, a milestone that commits Nasa to the first crewed lunar flyby in more than half a century.
With enough thrust to accelerate a stationary car to highway-driving speed in less than three seconds, the Orion capsule engine blasted on Thursday the astronauts on their trajectory towards the moon, which they now will loop as part of the 10-day Artemis 2 mission.
The burn lasting just under six minutes propelled them on their three-day voyage towards Earth’s natural satellite, the first since 1972.
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They didn’t break free of earth’s orbit, the moon is also in the earth’s orbit. Humans won’t break free from the earth’s orbit till we send a manned mission to another planet or at least into interplanetary space.
Technically correct. But it is still a departure burn into another sphere of influence. So you can forgive the quibble. There’s nothing else massive enough in Earth’s orbit to do a free return trajectory around. Or an orbital insertion burn into. And technically lunar orbit is still an earth orbit, but no one would ever use the word that way when in a lunar orbit.
But, yeah, technically ;)
