NASA Launches Artemis II: The First Manned Mission To The Moon In More Than 50 Years
Credit: NASA
The United States successfully launched a manned spacecraft with four astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972 as part of the Artemis II mission. The journey around the moon is expected to take approximately 10 days.
On April 1, 2026, NASA launched Artemis II from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the first crewed mission of the Artemis program and the first human mission to the Moon in more than 50 years. NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are aboard the Orion spacecraft.
The mission will last approximately 10 days. After leaving low-Earth orbit, Orion will travel to the Moon, perform a flyby on a free-return trajectory, and then return to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
At its farthest point, the spacecraft will pass approximately 4,600 miles beyond the far side of the Moon. NASA expects Artemis II to surpass the previous record set by Apollo 13 for the furthest humans have traveled from Earth. If the mission goes as planned, humans will be farther from Earth than ever before.
After nearly three years of preparation, the crew became the first to fly as part of NASA’s Artemis program, a multi-billion-dollar series of missions launched in 2017 to establish a long-term U.S. presence on the Moon over the next decade and beyond.
