I set an alarm for 1:15 in the morning last Wednesday, which is not a thing I normally do for anything short of an actual emergency, and stumbled downstairs to make coffee at an hour when the coffee maker itself seemed confused about why I was up. NASA's Artemis I finally left the pad at 1:47 a.m. Eastern on November 16th, and I was determined to actually watch it live instead of catching the highlight clip the next morning like a normal person.
If you haven't been following along, this launch has been delayed roughly four hundred times, or it feels that way. There was the August 29th attempt that got scrubbed over an engine sensor problem. Then September 3rd, scrubbed again for a hydrogen leak. Then a couple of hurricanes showed up and NASA had to roll the whole stack back into the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is - I looked this up because I couldn't quite believe it - a four mile trip that takes something like eight hours at a top speed of under one mile per hour. Hurricane Nicole even caught up with the rocket while it was sitting out on the pad in early November and peeled up a strip of caulk near the crew capsule, and NASA just left it there and launched anyway, because the engineering analysis said it wasn't a real problem. Turns out they were right.
So watching the actual liftoff felt less like a normal news event and more like watching someone finally cross a finish line after tripping over their own shoelaces three times in a row. The countdown got down into single digits and I had this weird tight feeling it was going to scrub again, like the whole saga had trained me not to trust it. It didn't. The SLS lit up the Florida coast at 1:47 a.m. bright enough that the broadcast cameras basically went white for a second, and Orion rode off the top of the most powerful rocket NASA has ever flown.
I'll say the quiet part out loud: I think the SLS program is a genuinely embarrassing case study in how not to run a rocket program, cost-wise. Something on the order of four billion dollars per launch by NASA's own inspector general's numbers, for a vehicle that isn't reusable, flying hardware NASA has been funding in one form or another since the Constellation program got canceled back in 2010. Twelve years is a long time to get one rocket off a pad. I don't think that opinion has to cancel out the other one, though, which is that at quarter to two in the morning, sitting on my couch with a dog who had zero interest in space history and just wanted to know why the TV was on, watching that thing claw itself off the ground still put a lump in my throat. Both things are true at the same time. The program is a budgetary mess and the moment still mattered.
As of today Orion is already out past the Moon, on its way to what NASA calls a distant retrograde orbit, and it sent back some genuinely great photos over the weekend, including one with a sliver of Earth hanging small and blue past the spacecraft's solar array. Nobody's on board this trip - that's the entire point of Artemis I, it's the uncrewed dress rehearsal before a crew flies on Artemis II and NASA eventually tries landing astronauts near the lunar south pole on Artemis III, whenever that actually happens. The current mission profile has Orion splashing down off the coast of California sometime around December 11th, assuming nothing else goes sideways, and given this program's track record I'm not betting on that with total confidence.
If you also stayed up and watched it live, I'd be curious what setup you used. I had the NASA feed running on the living room TV and a second stream with the launch commentary loop going on my laptop because I wanted the technical chatter, and I still don't think I caught half of what the commentators were actually saying at one in the morning. Worth it anyway. There's something about watching a rocket that big leave the ground in the middle of the night, engines lighting up the low clouds over the coast, that no daytime replay clip is ever going to give you. My coffee had gone cold by the time Orion separated from the upper stage and I hadn't even noticed.