Florida, April 3 -- Nasa's crew of astronauts launched to space and reached a stable orbit, kicking off a landmark journey that will take them closer to the lunar surface than anyone has been in more than 50 years. The initial phase of the 10-day mission to lap the moon, a multibillion-dollar feat about a decade in the making, clears a major hurdle for Nasa and its legacy aerospace contractors as the agency works to establish a base on the lunar surface and ultimately venture to Mars. The crew's Lockheed Martin Corp.-built Orion capsule, stacked on the shoulders of Boeing Co.'s Space Launch System rocket, thundered off the launchpad at 6:35pm local time at Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The rocket system, taller than the Statue of Liberty, reached speeds of around 28,163 kilometres per hour as it hurtled to space. It blazed a trail of fire and smoke as it climbed and eventually shed its spent side boosters, which provided extra thrust. Inside the capsule, the astronauts could be seen pressed into their seats in bright orange space suits. About eight minutes into the flight, SLS' main engines shut down as expected and the capsule reached space. "We have a beautiful moonrise. We're headed right at it," Nasa astronaut and mission commander Reid Wiseman said during the live broadcast. About an hour later, the Orion capsule's main engine ignited, putting the spacecraft and the crew into a stable orbit around Earth. The crew are set to travel farther in space than anyone in history. The Artemis voyages will attempt to repeat and then leapfrog feats achieved during the historic Apollo programme that landed Neil Armstrong and 11 other men on the lunar surface in the 1960s and 1970s. With Artemis - named after the twin goddess of Apollo - Nasa aims to stay on the moon long-term. President Donald Trump's Nasa administrator, Jared Isaacman has laid out a decade-long $30-billion plan to set up a base on the moon where astronauts can live and work. Isaacman has also sped through a significant makeover of the overall mission, including adding a test mission in 2027 that will send a crew to dock with one of the lunar landers being built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. "It is far less stressful to be strapped into the rocket than to be responsible for it here on Earth," Isaacman, who has flown to orbit twice on SpaceX missions, said during a post-launch news conference. The crew will spend roughly four days travelling to the lunar vicinity, where they will swing behind the moon's far side - a vantage that is never seen from Earth. They are slated to perform a flyby of the lunar surface on April 6. Wiseman, a 27-year Navy veteran and former head of the agency's astronaut office, is joined by Nasa astronauts Victor Glover, the mission's pilot, and Christina Koch, a mission specialist who conducted the first all-female spacewalk. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, another crew member, will be flying to space for the first time on this trip....