The crew of NASA’s Artemis spacecraft entered quarantine ahead of a planned launch as soon as Wednesday.
All going well, the four crewmembers will be in space for 10 days, traveling around the moon — the first crewed trip there, and the first time humans have left low Earth orbit, since 1972 — before splashing down in the Pacific.
The trip itself has been repeatedly delayed, and the Artemis program had been pushed back, but NASA has expanded its plans in recent weeks: It wants to build a permanent base on the moon within seven years, and plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars to deploy helicopter drones there by 2028.