REUTERS, Orlando

The Orion capsule carrying four astronauts on Nasa’s Artemis II mission fired thrusters early yesterday, propelling the crew out of Earth’s orbit and onto a path toward the moon, committing them to the farthest distance humans have ever traveled in space.

The successful maneuver put the crew on a path to enter the moon’s sphere of gravitational influence by Sunday morning, as they prepare to beat the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970.

“We are getting just a beautiful view of the dark side of the Earth lit by the moon right now. Phenomenal,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen told mission control some 10 minutes after the thruster firing.

Since launching 26 hours earlier from Florida, the astronauts spent their first day in space testing cameras, steering their Orion spacecraft and dealing with small toilet and email issues that were later fixed.

They had been in a highly elliptical Earth orbit swinging them as far as 43,000 miles (64,000 km) away on one end and about 100 miles close on the other, from where the key thruster firing

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