NASA's SLS-Orion spacecraft has a minimum cost of $37 billion.
Orion carried a mannequin crew of three, one male and two female.
According to NASA, the Artemis I programme has created thousands of employment.

After taking off from Florida on its maiden flight on Wednesday, NASA's massive next-generation rocketship was on schedule for an unmanned lunar orbital journey around the moon and back, exactly 50 years after the last lunar mission of the Apollo era.

The much-delayed launch marked the beginning of the Artemis programme, which will succeed Apollo and send people back to the moon this decade in order to build a permanent base there and pave the way for future manned missions to Mars.

At 1:47am EST (12:17pm IST), the 32-story-tall Space Launch System (SLS) rocket launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, piercing the darkness over Cape Canaveral with a fiery red tail. According to NASA, the Orion spacecraft was successfully propelled out of Earth orbit and into its course for the moon about 90 minutes after the rocket's upper stage was fired.

After 10 weeks marred by technical difficulties, back-to-back hurricanes, and two trips to trudge the spacecraft out of its hangar to the launch pad, liftoff finally occurred on the third attempt to launch the billions dollar rocket. Crews had to handle a slew of concurrent problems, including a faulty fuel valve, around four hours prior to Wednesday's blastoff.

The launch was saved thanks to quick work on the launch pad by a special team of specialists who secured a loose connection far inside the 'blast zone' marked out around a nearly fully fueled rocket.

The combined SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, which were manufactured by Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., respectively, under a contract with NASA, will make their first flight during the three-week Artemis I mission.

It also represents a significant shift in the direction of NASA's post-Apollo human spaceflight programme after decades of the agency focusing on low-Earth orbit with space shuttles and the International Space Station. Aiming to send astronauts back to the moon's surface as early as 2025, the Artemis spacecraft is named for the ancient Greek hunter goddess and Apollo's twin sister.