The Artemis I mission brought Orion on its closest approach to the moon while blasting out on its way to an orbit that will take it farther from the Earth than any previous human-rated spacecraft.

Orion entered the moon's gravitational influence on Sunday and used that power along with a thruster on an outbound powered burn to come within 81 miles from the lunar surface. It will over the next week get as far as about 40,000 miles away from the moon.

That would bring it about 268.000 miles away from Earth surpassing the distance away from Earth traveled by Apollo 13 by about 30,000 miles.

"This is one of those days you've been thinking about and dreaming about for a long, long time," said NASA flight director Zeb Scoville. "This morning we just saw the Earth set behind the moon as we take the next human-rated vehicle around the moon preparing to bring humans back there within a few years. This is a game changer."

Orion launched from Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 16 atop the Space Launch System becoming the most powerful rocket to successfully launch from Earth into space with its 8.8 million pounds of thrust.

The moon is incredibly hot, and also incredibly cold.

There's radiation. A thin atmosphere. No air to breathe.

If NASA ever establishes a lunar base—a long-term project advanced Wednesday with the launch of Artemis I—it will have to confront these challenges to human habitation.

It'll also have to figure out the dust.

Lunar dust is made of gnarly little particles—jagged and sharp-edged grains that add up to a major problem for astronauts and just about any human-made object that's supposed to land or take off from the moon.

For years, NASA scientists have studied just how much damage that dust, along with lunar gravel and rocks, could cause, particularly when it gets kicked up by rocket engines and starts jetting about at speeds faster than a bullet.

"This is not just fluffy dust that's going to put a little coat on your … hardware," said Philip Metzger, planetary scientist at University of Central Florida who has researched the effects of interplanetary dust since 1997. "This is sandblasting, damaging; it's rocks at high velocity, sand grains, high-velocity gravel."

One of the foremost institutions studying lunar dust and its potential effect on human missions is the Swamp Works, a NASA research lab co-founded in 2013 by Metzger, who is now retired from the agency but still collaborates on some projects.

NASA's Orion capsule reached the moon Monday, whipping around the far side and buzzing the lunar surface on its way to a record-breaking orbit with test dummies sitting in for astronauts.

It's the first time a capsule has visited the moon since NASA's Apollo program 50 years ago, and represents a huge milestone in the $4.1 billion test flight that began last Wednesday.

The close approach of 81 miles (130 kilometers) occurred as the crew capsule and its three wired-up dummies were on the far side of the moon. Because of a half-hour communication blackout, flight controllers in Houston did not know if the critical engine firing went well until the capsule emerged from behind the moon, 232,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) from Earth.