NASA's Artemis 1's Orion Spacecraft lost contact for 47 minutes: Report

NASA's Orion spacecraft lost contact with the space agency at 12:09 a.m. CST for 47 minutes, and it was forced to overnight reset the communication link between Orion and the Deep Space Network.

Engineers, however, restored the connection and fixed the problem by reconfiguring the ground side. The crew is investigating the cause of the signal loss, and reconfiguration has been done successfully a number of times over the last few days, according to NASA.

"The team resolved the issue with a reconfiguration on the ground side. Engineers are examining data from the event to help determine what happened, and the command and data handling officer will be downlinking data recorded onboard Orion during the outage to include in that assessment. There was no impact to Orion, and the spacecraft remains in a healthy configuration," NASA said in the brief.

The spacecraft has already left the influence of the Moon, and it will likely continue its journey away from the Moon as it enters a far-off retrograde orbit.

The Orion spacecraft's next journey:

The new orbit is retrograde because Orion will circle the Moon in the opposite direction from how the Moon orbits Earth, and it is distant because it is high above the Moon's surface. On Friday, the spacecraft will be the farthest away from the Moon.

The second of two operations needed to launch Orion into a very stable orbit that uses less fuel while orbiting the Moon is the distant retrograde orbit insertion burn.

While orbiting the Moon, Orion is without a lunar lander; astronauts from NASA won't attempt a lunar landing with SpaceX's Starship until 2025. Prior to then, astronauts would board Orion and go around the moon as early as 2024.