A small Nasa-financed spacecraft was launched from New Zealand on Tuesday, kicking off the space agency’s plans to send astronauts back to the moon in a few years. The spacecraft, called CAPSTONE, is about the size of a microwave oven.

It will study a specific orbit where Nasa plans to build a small space station for astronauts to stop at before and after going to the moon’s surface. At 9:55pm local time, a 59-foot-tall rocket carrying CAPSTONE lifted off from a launchpad along the eastern coast of New Zealand. Although the mission is to gather information for Nasa, it is owned and operated by a private company, Advanced Space, based in Westminster, Colorado. For a spacecraft headed to the moon, CAPSTONE is inexpensive, costing just under $30 million including the launch by Rocket Lab, a US-New Zealand company.

The first two stages of the Electron rocket placed CAPSTONE into an elliptical orbit around Earth. For this mission, Rocket Lab essentially added a third stage that will methodically raise the altitude of the spacecraft. At that point, CAPSTONE will head on its way to the moon, taking a slow but efficient path.

(New York Times News Service)