Artemis 2 moon launch brought nearly 350,000 people to Florida's Space Coast

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If you were sitting in Florida traffic after the April 1 launch of the historic Artemis 2 astronaut mission around the moon, that's because Space Coast tourism hit a big high.

About 346,000 U.S. visitors — roughly the equivalent of the population of Honolulu, Hawaii — were in the northern half of Brevard County (on the Atlantic coast, near Orlando) between March 29 and April 4 during the Artemis 2 launch campaign, according to the Space Coast Office of Tourism.

The survey used cellular device-tracking software of U.S. adults who live outside of the region, the office stated. Naturally, this would only measure a portion of the visitors. "This does not include international phone carriers, children, people without phones, phones that were off or Brevard County residents," the office said in an emailed statement.

Artemis 2 sent four astronauts — NASA's Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot) and Christina Koch (mission specialist), and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — on a 10-day loop around the moon. It was the first mission beyond low Earth orbit since 1972, when Apollo 17 put people down on the lunar surface.

The historic launch brought a lot more people to Brevard County than comparable missions. For example, the uncrewed Artemis 1 launch to lunar orbit in November 2022 generated 226,000 visitors, the the Space Coast Office of Tourism stated.

The organization also tracked an average of 55,000 out-of-county visitors "over the past few years" for nine other major launches, such as crewed missions to the International Space Station, the two Polaris Program SpaceX astronaut launches, and liftoffs of SpaceX's powerful Falcon Heavy rocket.

A typical Artemis 2 visitor spent two days on the coast, the cell software showed, generating an average spend of $462. (The spending number is extrapolated from a separate tourism survey examining how much a visitor spends per day.)

That level of spending extrapolates to a total of $41 million in visitor spending across the Artemis 2 launch week.