In their own words: the Artemis II crew on the hectic first hours of their flight

However, nobody will be able to sleep when the starting window is opened.

Wiseman: About seven seconds prior to the lift, light the four main engines and arrive at full power. And then the solids light, and that is when you go. What is crazy for me is that it is six and a half seconds in flight before the solids release the top of the tower. Five million pound machines go upright. Six and a half seconds to clear the tower. As a person I can't wait to feel that power.

The powerful boosters on the side will separate just over two minutes. They will have done the vast majority of lifting to that point, with the rocket already reaching a speed of 3,100 mph (5,000 km / h) and a height of 30 miles (48 km), well on the way to the space. As Payload specialists, Koch and Hansen will largely go for the ride. Wiseman, the commander and glover, the pilot, will follow the launch, although the flight of the rocket will be fully automated, unless something goes wrong.

Wiseman: Victor and I, we have a lot of work. We have many systems to check. Hopefully everything will be great, and if that is not the case, we are very well trained about what we have to do.

After 8 minutes and 3 seconds, the core phase of the rocket is closed and the upper stage and Orion spacecraft separate about 10 seconds later. They will be in space, with about 40 minutes to prepare for their next large maneuver.

In a job to

Koch: The wildest in this mission is that literally, immediately after the main engine, the first thing Jeremy and I do, get up and start working. I don't know any other mission, certainly not in my memory, where that has been the case in terms of physical movement in the vehicle, which sets things up.

Koch, Wiseman and Glover have already flown to space, either on a SpaceX Dragon or Russian Soyuz vehicle, and spent a few months at the international space station. So they know how their body will respond to weightlessness. Almost half of all astronauts experience “Space Adaptation Syndrome” during their first flight to a job, and there is really no way to predict who will find it in advance. This is a real concern for Hansen, a first kite, who is expected to jump out of his chair and starts working.

Hansen: I am certainly worried about that, only from the point of view of space for movement disease. So I will just be very intentional. I won't move my head much. It is clear that I have to get up and move. And I will just be very intentional in the first few hours while I move. And the other that I will do – it's very different from Space Station – is just remembering everything, so I don't have to read the procedure about those first few things. So I'm not constantly going to the [tablet] And read, and then up. And I will just try to minimize what I do.

Koch and Hansen will set up and test essential lifestyle systems on the spacecraft, because if the bathroom does not work, they will not go to the moon.

Hansen: We split the vehicle a little in succession. So Christina is on the side of the toilet. She takes care of all that stuff. I am on the side of the water dispenser, what they want to know: can we hand in water? It is not a very complicated system. We just have to get up, remove the stuff from the storage, connect it. I will have some camera equipment that I will take off there. I have the masks that we use when we have a fire and we try to purify the smoke. I have to set it up and make sure they are ready to go. So they are only small jobs, small chances and ends.

In contrast to a conventional rocket mission, the upper stage of Artemis II vehicle, known as the interim cryogenic propagation stage, will not immediately shoot. On the contrary, after separating the core phase, Orion will be in an elliptical track that will take it to an Apogee of 1200 nautical miles, almost five times higher than the international space station. There the crew will be further from the earth than anyone since the Apollo program.