Orion is part of NASA's Artemis program, which aims to eventually establish a lunar outpost that can permanently host astronauts for the first time in history, in the hopes of one day paving a route to Mars.
November 16, when NASA's beleaguered and long-delayed Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket vaulted the Orion capsule to space, cementing the rocket as the most powerful operational launch vehicle ever built.
Orion is now about a day from entering a "distant retrograde orbit" around our closest neighbor - distant, because it will be at a very high altitude above the lunar surface, and retrograde, because it will circle the moon in the opposite direction from which the moon travels around Earth.
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