Nasa has launched four astronauts on a 1mn km flight around the Moon and back, the next step in the US space agency’s plans to establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface. The 10-day mission will take humans further into space than ever before, and is designed to test many of the technologies that Nasa will use for Artemis IV, scheduled to land on the Moon in 2028. Last week Nasa laid out a phased programme to build a $20bn Moon base. It will start with occasional human visits to build infrastructure on the lunar surface and then eventually transition over several years to continuous human habitation. This launch marks the first time since the Apollo 17 mission of December 1972 that humans will have left lower Earth orbit.
Artemis 11 took off at 6.35pm 1 April 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida with a successful Jupiter in the 10th square the Full Moon; Uranus in the far-travelled 9th, a costly Venus in Taurus in the financial 8th, Pluto in the grandstanding 5th and Saturn Neptune together in the 6th fittingly for the first woman and first black man to go into space.
NASA 29 July 1958, will be on tenterhooks and under great pressure with tr Pluto square its Mars exactly now and moving to oppose its Leo Sun in 2027. Tr Uranus will also square its Pluto Mercury from mid May and throughout the rest of the year which will either cause an upset to plans or bring a renewed push with innovative projects. It is certainly facing a challenging year and on as tr Pluto moves to oppose the Sun/Uranus midpoint in 2028/29 and then oppose the Uranus for a major turnaround.
There is nothing like as difficult or calamitous in the NASA’s astrology as there was for the Challenger disaster in 1986 when there was a destructive Solar Arc Mars square Pluto.
Astronauts are beyond brave – or have a different mentality to ordinary folk. Living on the edge.
The post Artemis 11 – flying to the Moon and back first appeared on Astroinform with Marjorie Orr – Star4cast.
