Eight days from now, four humans will climb into a capsule the size of a minibus, sit on top of the most powerful rocket America has ever built, and head to the Moon.
No human has left Earth orbit since December 1972. That’s over fifty years of staring at the Moon from a distance, sending robots, probing, photographing, theorizing — but never going back ourselves. Artemis II changes that. Launching no earlier than April 1, 2026, it will be humanity’s first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17.
And yes, that launch date is April Fools’ Day. NASA has not commented on the irony.
Who’s Going
The crew of four are not rookies. Commander Reid Wiseman is a former Navy test pilot and veteran ISS resident. Pilot Victor Glover flew on Crew Dragon and became the first Black astronaut to live long-term on the ISS. Mission specialist Christina Koch holds the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman (328 days). And mission specialist Jeremy Hansen is a Canadian Space Agency astronaut — a space rookie, about to go from zero to lunar orbit on his first flight.
The firsts are stacking up: Glover will become the first person of color to travel to the Moon’s vicinity. Koch will be the first woman. Hansen the first non-American to leave Earth orbit. This isn’t just a mission — it’s a statement about who gets to explore the cosmos.
The Spacecraft: Orion and the Big Orange Rocket
They’ll be riding NASA’s Space Launch System — the SLS — a 98-meter-tall beast containing over three million litres of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. It has only flown once before, on the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022. This time there are people on board.
Sitting on top is the Orion spacecraft, a crew capsule built by Lockheed Martin with a European service module from Airbus. Orion is inspired by Apollo’s design philosophy but thoroughly modern inside — digital controls, life support systems that actually work, and crucially, a toilet. (Apollo astronauts didn’t have one. Let that sink in.)
The living space is about 5 meters wide by 3 meters tall. Four adults. Ten days. No private rooms. Mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, who stands 6’2″, has already joked that “Canada did get more than its fair share of the volume of the mission by assigning me.”
What They’re Actually Doing
Artemis II is a test mission. There’s no lunar landing — that’s Artemis IV in 2028. The goal here is to take humans further from Earth than anyone has ever been, stress-test the Orion spacecraft in deep space, and come back alive.
The plan goes like this:
- Day 1: Launch from Kennedy Space Center, orbit Earth at 70,000 km altitude (the ISS sits at 400 km — context makes this hit differently). Manual test flight of Orion. Life support checks. Including the toilet.
- Day 2–3: Trans-lunar injection burn. Orion fires its main engine, breaks free of Earth’s gravity, and commits to the Moon. No easy turning back from here.
- Days 4–6: Approach and flyby. The crew will swing around the Moon on a free-return trajectory — a figure-eight path that uses lunar gravity to slingshot them back toward Earth without requiring extra fuel. Elegant physics.
- At closest approach: They’ll come within about 6,400 miles (10,300 km) of the lunar surface — close enough to see it in stunning detail, but not close enough to land. Think of it as the universe giving you a window seat without letting you off the plane.
- At farthest point: Roughly 5,000 miles beyond the Moon, Artemis II will be the farthest any humans have ever traveled from Earth. The previous record was set by Apollo 13 in 1970 — accidentally, during an emergency.
- Day 10: Splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, recovered by the US Navy.
The Speed of Coming Home
Reentry will be among the most intense moments of the mission. Orion will hit Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 25,000 mph (40,000 km/h) — faster than any crewed spacecraft since the Apollo era. The heat shield will need to handle temperatures around 5,000°F (2,760°C). It was designed for this, tested on Artemis I, and rated for success.
But space is honest about risk. All four astronauts sat down with their families to talk through worst-case scenarios before training began. Pilot Victor Glover noted that each crew member will have a designated NASA astronaut companion stationed with their family during launch — “which can be this terrific and terrifying moment all at the same time.”
Why This Matters Beyond the Headlines
There’s a version of this story where Artemis II is just NASA doing NASA things — bureaucratic, slow, billions of dollars for a mission that doesn’t even land. Fair point. SpaceX’s Starship is waiting in the wings. Private lunar missions are coming. The space landscape of 2026 looks nothing like 1972.
But there’s something irreducibly significant about humans leaving Earth orbit again. We’ve built machines that roam Mars, that photograph black holes, that mapped the cosmic microwave background. We’ve sent probes past the edge of the solar system. And yet, for fifty-plus years, no human body has traveled further than the ISS — a few hundred kilometers up.
Artemis II is the proof-of-concept that the next phase actually begins. It sets up Artemis III (a docking test planned for 2027) and Artemis IV (lunar landing, 2028). It validates that Orion can keep humans alive in deep space. And it puts four real people — with names, families, and decades of training — at the farthest edge of human presence in the universe.
Commander Reid Wiseman put it simply: “It is a test mission and we are ready for every scenario… It’s going to be amazing.”
The Big Picture
After Artemis II, the plan is:
- Artemis III (2027): Earth orbit docking test of the Orion spacecraft
- Artemis IV (2028): First crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17
- Long-term goal: A permanent Moon base, as humanity’s first real step toward learning how to live on another world
The Moon is just the practice run. Mars is the destination. And it all starts, somehow, on April Fools’ Day 2026.
Watch the launch live at nasa.gov/live — April 1, approximately 6:24 PM EDT / 00:24 UTC (April 2).
Sources: BBC News, NASA Artemis II, Wikipedia
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