Artemis 2 record

Cape Canaveral, Florida (dpa) — The crew of the Artemis 2 lunar mission has travelled further from Earth than any humans ever before, the US space agency NASA announced on Monday.

The four astronauts broke the record set in 1970 by the crew of the Apollo 13 mission at about 400,171 kilometres.

They are expected to travel even further from Earth in the coming hours.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said the mission was also intended to honour the crew’s predecessors in human space flight.

He also said the achievement should “challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.”

The crew – US astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman, as well as Hansen – lifted off on Wednesday evening aboard the Orion capsule on the Space Launch System rocket from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida.

Earlier on Monday, NASA said they had reached the moon’s sphere of gravitational influence, meaning the point at which the moon’s gravity has a stronger effect than Earth’s.