A crowd gathered at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida, on Wednesday evening as the Artemis II mission lifted off, marking the first human-crewed journey toward the moon since 1972.

Among those in attendance was a young space enthusiast who had traveled to Florida to witness the launch in person.

The boy waited at the space center ahead of the mission and mounted a GoPro camera to his NASA cap in an effort to record the moment.

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When approached by a CNN reporter and asked why he wanted to be “apart of history,” the boy responded, “We’re going back to the frickin’ moon, that’s why!”

The Artemis II rocket launched shortly after 6:30 p.m. for a mission expected to last 10 days.

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The spacecraft carries a four-person crew made up of three Americans and one Canadian.

The crew is scheduled to travel approximately 685,000 miles during the mission as they orbit the moon and return to Earth.

According to mission details, the spacecraft will take about four days to reach the moon before beginning its return trajectory.

NASA officials reported that the launch proceeded with minimal complications.

Engineers addressed a temperature issue in one of the two Launch Abort Systems roughly 19 minutes before the scheduled launch window opened around 6:30 p.m.

After resolving the issue, all systems were confirmed ready for liftoff.

The rocket reached orbit approximately nine minutes after launch.

NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston is overseeing the mission and will continue to monitor the spacecraft and crew continuously throughout the 10-day flight.

The Artemis II mission follows the earlier Artemis I flight, which took place in 2022.

That mission followed a similar path around the moon but did not include a human crew.

The current mission represents the first time astronauts have traveled toward the moon since NASA’s Apollo program concluded with Apollo 17 in 1972.

During the Apollo missions between 1968 and 1972, a total of 24 astronauts traveled to the moon.

Officials have described Artemis II as a key step in NASA’s broader efforts to return humans to the moon and establish a sustained presence in lunar orbit and on the lunar surface in the coming years.

Spectators at Kennedy Space Center watched as the rocket ascended into the evening sky, marking a milestone moment in the agency’s return to crewed lunar exploration.

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