“Christina Koch, who will become the first woman to fly around the moon.”

“Nasa has said that if “all systems remain healthy” on the Orion spacecraft then mission controllers will later give the command to conduct a translunar injection burn, a six-minute engine firing that will send the capsule on its 240,000-mile journey to the moon.”

“The crew will then loop around the back of the moon – becoming the four people to travel the farthest from Earth in history – and then use the celestial body’s gravity to launch back home.”

“The astronauts – three Americans and one Canadian – took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, in front of tens of thousands of people who gathered to witness the launch of Nasa’s most-powerful rocket, called the Space Launch System.”

“Much of the trip will serve to test systems for future Artemis missions. There have already been minor issues, including a temporary communication problem, reports by the astronauts that the cabin was a little cold and a blinking fault light with the onboard toilet that the crew noticed shortly after launch.”

“The crew also completed a proximity operations demonstration in which they manually manoeuvred the capsule to assess how it would handle when docking to another spacecraft.”

“The crew have also been photographing Earth from huge distances. “The view out window three, from about 38,000 nautical miles, the entire view of the Earth is spectacular,” said the mission commander, Reid Wiseman, on Thursday.”