NASA’S Orion spacecraft was yesterday orbiting the Moon halfway through its milestone test flight.
The capsule — with three mannequins instead of astronauts — fired up its engines on Friday.
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Orion should reach record distances of 270,000 to Earth within the next few days.
The mission is part of Nasa’s £4billion Artemis project, which is aiming for a 2025 lunar landing, the first since the Apollo 17 flight in 1972.
Mission control in Houston lost touch with Orion briefly last week.
Nasa’s Jim Geffre said of the mission: “It’s about challenging ourselves to go farther, stay longer and push beyond the limits of what we’ve previously explored.”
This update is coming after Artemis 1 lifted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral (Florida) on Wednesday, November 16, at 11.04 a.m. EST.
A number of Nasa webcasts were held prior to the unmanned Artemis 1 mission, which was also the Space Launch System rocket’s first test flight using its Orion spacecraft.