CENTRAL FLORIDA — NASA launched the Artemis II mission from Central Florida this week, sending a crew to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. The Orion capsule, named Integrity, is now on its way to the moon carrying four astronauts — Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy — on a 685,000-mile journey that will take them more than 250,000 miles from Earth, farther than any humans have traveled into space.

If all goes as planned, the crew will circle the moon on Monday. During the lunar flyby, the astronauts are expected to lose communications with Earth for approximately 30 minutes as the capsule passes behind the moon. After completing the flyby, the crew will return to Earth, descend under parachutes, and be retrieved by Navy helicopters and ships.

The launch was livestreamed on NASA's website, and video of the event has drawn more than 18 million views on YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of spectators traveled to Central Florida to watch the launch in person.

"Moon To Mars and the Artemis campaign is an extension of what our future plans in space are going to be. And we're going back to the moon this time, first of all, to a different part of the moon - the South Pole, where we think water ice is. And we're going there to learn how to live, work, and cultivate resources like that water ice to help inform how we might do future human exploration through space," said Bale Dalton, former NASA chief of staff, in an interview.

NASA plans to land astronauts on the moon as soon as 2028 as part of the Artemis IV mission. Separately, China aims to put people on the moon by 2030 and has announced plans for a lunar base.

"It just goes to show the amount of effort and the amount of anticipation that's gone into this crew doing things that have never been done before - traveling away from Earth on a total of 685,000-mile journey, being the furthest into space as any humans have ever been before," Dalton said.

"There in mission control, and certainly in my own mind, it will be a time of tense anticipation, of waiting to hear from them again on the other side," Dalton said, referring to the planned communications blackout during the lunar flyby.

The Artemis program involves 14 NASA facilities nationwide, and tens of thousands of engineers, scientists, researchers, and astronauts have worked on the effort. The broader Moon to Mars program supports almost 100,000 jobs. Since the end of the Apollo program, private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have developed space exploration capabilities, and the Artemis campaign has incorporated public-private partnerships.