Four astronauts were treated to a spectacular moonrise as they blasted off on Thursday morning (AEDT) to travel deeper into space than any humans have ever gone.

NASA’s historic Artemis II mission made a thunderous ascent from Florida, leaving behind a towering column of thick white vapour.

The 10-day trip will travel around the moon — but not land on it.

It marks the United States’ boldest step yet toward ‌returning humans to the lunar surface this decade before China’s first crewed landing.

A few minutes after take-off, space commander Reid Wiseman communicated a wondrous sight.

“Great view” he declared. “We have got a great Moonrise”.

There was a brief malfunction when just under an hour into the flight the Orion spacecraft suffered a communications issue.

The crew’s responses could not be heard “for a brief period of time” but the glitch was eventually corrected.

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, topped with an Orion crew capsule, roared to life at ‌the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre at sunset (Wednesday US time).

Its crew included three US astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

“This is Jeremy, we are going for all humanity,” Hansen, strapped inside Orion, told launch control minutes before liftoff.

The ​Artemis II ​mission will send the crew some 406,000km into space — ​the farthest humans have ever travelled.

The current record for the farthest spaceflight at around 399,000km ‌is held by the three-man crew of the Apollo 13 lunar mission in 1970, which was beset by technical problems after an oxygen tank exploded and was unable to land on the moon as planned.

“Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy, on this ‌historic mission you take with ‌you the heart of ⁠this Artemis team, the daring spirit of the American people and our partners across the globe, and the hopes and dreams ​of a new generation,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson told the crew through a communications line from launch control.

“Good luck, godspeed, Artemis II. Let’s go,” she said.

After nearly three years of training, the crew is the first to fly in NASA’s Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar series of missions created in 2017 to build up a long-term US presence on the moon over the next decade and beyond.

The launch was a major milestone more than a decade in the making for the US space agency’s SLS rocket, handing its core contractors Boeing and Northrop Grumman long-sought validation that the 30-storey-tall system ⁠can safely loft humans into space, as NASA increasingly relies on newer, cheaper rockets from Elon Musk’s ‌SpaceX and others.

The crew’s ​gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, built for NASA by Lockheed Martin, will separate from the SLS upper stage three-and-a-half hours into flight in Earth’s orbit.

The crew will then take manual control of Orion ​to test its ‌steering and manoeuvrability around the detached upper stage, attempting the first of dozens of test objectives planned throughout the mission.

The Artemis II mission is a key early step in the ​flagship US moon program, which is targeting its first crewed landing on the lunar surface in 2028 in the Artemis IV mission.

NASA is pressed to achieve that lunar landing — its first since the final Apollo mission in 1972 — as China expands its own lunar program with a planned astronaut landing as soon as 2030.

NASA launched its first Artemis mission without crew in 2022, sending the Orion spacecraft on a similar path around the moon and back.

Artemis II will pose a greater test of Orion and the SLS rocket. Boeing and Northrop Grumman have led the development of SLS since 2010, a program partly known for its ballooning costs at an estimated $US2 billion ($2.9 billion) to $US4 billion ($5.8 billion) per launch.

Elon Musk’s ​SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to develop the landers that NASA will use to put its astronauts on the lunar surface.

Artemis III had been set to ​be the agency’s first astronaut moon landing, but new ⁠NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman in February added an extra test mission before the landing.

-with AAP