Artemis I — uncrewed Moon-orbit test flight

At 1:47 a.m. on 16 November 2022, night turned to day over the Florida coast. The Space Launch System, fifty years in spirit and eleven in development, finally left Launch Complex 39B on 8.8 million pounds of thrust, more than any rocket that had ever reached orbit. Getting there had taken everything: two scrubbed launch attempts, a rollback for Hurricane Ian, riding out Hurricane Nicole at the pad, and, that very night, a 'red crew' of three technicians sent into the blast danger zone to tighten fittings on a leaking hydrogen valve while the rocket stood fueled behind them.

Atop the rocket flew Orion, paired with ESA's European Service Module, on the deepest shakedown cruise ever given to a human-rated spacecraft. Its crew was deliberately strange: Commander Moonikin Campos, a sensor-laden manikin named for Arturo Campos, the engineer who helped save Apollo 13; two radiation-measuring torsos called Helga and Zohar; and a Snoopy doll floating as the zero-gravity indicator. Orion swept about 130 kilometres above the lunar surface, swung out into a distant retrograde orbit, and on 28 November reached 268,563 miles from Earth, farther than any spacecraft built for humans had ever flown.

The return was the real test. On 11 December, fifty years to the day after Apollo 17 made humanity's last crewed Moon landing, Orion hit the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 miles per hour and performed the first skip entry ever flown by a crew-capable spacecraft, glancing off the upper atmosphere like a stone on water to ease the g-loads and steer toward its recovery zone. The heat shield endured temperatures near 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Twenty-five days, ten hours and 53 minutes after launch, with 1.4 million miles travelled, Orion bobbed in the Pacific off Baja California, intact.