On April 1, 2026, NASA’s Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen — on a roughly ten-day flight around the Moon. It was the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the crew splashed down safely in the Pacific on April 11.
A record-setting loop around the Moon
Artemis II was a free-return flyby: the giant Space Launch System threw the Orion capsule onto a path that curved around the far side of the Moon and let lunar gravity sling it back home — no landing, no orbit insertion. At their farthest point the crew were 252,756 miles (about 407,000 km) from Earth, a new record for the greatest distance humans have ever travelled from home.
A crew of firsts
Commander Reid Wiseman led a crew that rewrote several records at once. Christina Koch became the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit, Victor Glover the first person of color, and Jeremy Hansen the first Canadian — the first time anyone but an American had flown so far from Earth. For all four, it was a journey no human had made in fifty years.
The dress rehearsal for a landing
The mission’s real job was to prove that Orion and its life-support, navigation and communication systems can keep a crew alive in deep space. With that box ticked, NASA turns to Artemis III — the flight meant to land astronauts near the Moon’s south pole for the first time since Apollo, using a version of SpaceX’s Starship as the lander. Artemis II now stands as the newest entry on our Space Timeline: the return flight that reopened the road to the Moon.
Image: NASA / Artemis II launch (public domain).
Explore the machines and milestones behind this mission in the Space Timeline and the full Spacecraft Encyclopedia.