Together with fellow astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, he launched from Earth toward the moon just before 2 a.m. Friday, local time in Sweden.
The Orion spacecraft is now scheduled to orbit the moon once before returning to Earth.
The crew is feeling pretty good up here on our way to the moon, Hansen says in a live broadcast from the US space agency NASA.
The space trip is the first in 53 years to target the moon.
