On the evening of April 1, 2026, barring weather or a last-minute technical hold, the largest rocket ever built by NASA will ignite its engines on Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center — the same pad that sent Apollo 11 to the Moon in 1969 — and four human beings will begin a journey that no person has attempted in 53 years. They will fly around the Moon. They will see the lunar far side up close, a view that has been witnessed by fewer than two dozen humans in all of history. And then they will come home. It sounds simple. It is anything but.
The Mission: Ten Days, 1.3 Million Miles, and One Flyby That Changes Everything
Artemis II is not a lunar landing — that comes later, with Artemis III. What it is, precisely, is a crewed test of the complete deep-space system: the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion crew capsule, the life support infrastructure, the navigation and communications architecture, and above all, the four human beings who will trust their lives to hardware that has never carried people this far from Earth. The mission profile is a free-return trajectory — meaning Orion will use the Moon's gravity to slingshot around and return to Earth without needing to brake into lunar orbit. If something goes wrong, the physics of the trajectory bring the crew home. It is, by design, the safest possible crewed deep-space mission. It is also, by any measure, one of the most ambitious.
The journey to the lunar vicinity takes three days. The crew will spend approximately one day near the Moon, passing over the lunar far side at altitudes as low as 8,900 kilometers — close enough to see features no human eye has witnessed at that proximity. Then they turn for home: three days back, entry into Earth's atmosphere at speeds approaching 40,000 kilometers per hour, and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, where the US Navy will recover the capsule. Total mission time: ten days. Total distance traveled: roughly 1.3 million miles.
“We've never gone to the moon to stay, and we've never gone to the moon in an era where we know how important it is to go for all and by all. The fact that we are truly answering humanity's call to explore — if we represent all of humanity, we recognize how important it is that every single person who has a contribution to make is going to be able to make that contribution.”
— Christina Koch, NASA Mission Specialist, Artemis II crew — first woman to fly beyond low Earth orbit
The Crew: Four People Who Make History Twice
The Artemis II crew was selected in April 2023, and in the three years since, they have been training, waiting, and watching the SLS hardware stack rise at Kennedy. Commander Reid Wiseman is a Navy test pilot and former International Space Station commander with 165 days in orbit — a seasoned spacefarer who will serve as the mission's steady hand. Pilot Victor Glover, also a Navy aviator, flew to the ISS aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon in 2020 and became the first Black astronaut to serve on a long-duration ISS mission. Tomorrow, he will become the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit in the history of human spaceflight.
Mission Specialist Christina Koch holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman — 328 consecutive days on the ISS — and led three spacewalks during her tenure, including the first all-female spacewalk in history alongside fellow astronaut Jessica Meir. Tomorrow she becomes the first woman to venture toward the Moon. Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — the crew's fourth member — has never flown in space before. His first flight will be a lunar flyby, making him the first Canadian to travel beyond low Earth orbit and the first person to make their debut spaceflight at the Moon since the Apollo era.
“We need to celebrate this moment in human history. It is the next step in the journey that will get humanity to Mars.”
— Victor Glover, NASA Pilot, Artemis II — first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit
The Machine: $55 Billion and the Most Powerful Rocket Since Saturn V
The Space Launch System is, by thrust output, the most powerful operational rocket on Earth. Its Block 1 configuration — the variant flying Artemis II — generates 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, surpassing even the legendary Saturn V that carried Apollo crews to the Moon in the 1960s and 70s. Paired with the Orion crew capsule, designed by Lockheed Martin and supported by a European Service Module built by Airbus, it represents the most capable deep-space crewed vehicle ever assembled.
It has also been extraordinarily expensive. By the time Artemis II lifts off, NASA will have spent more than $55 billion on SLS, Orion, and the ground systems needed for the Artemis missions combined. Each individual SLS launch costs approximately $4.1 billion — a figure that has drawn sustained criticism from the aerospace community, where commercial launch costs have plummeted over the same period. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has its own lunar architecture in development, has repeatedly argued that the SLS program represents a fundamental misallocation of national resources. NASA's counterargument is that SLS can send Orion and a full crew directly to the Moon in a single launch — a capability no commercial vehicle currently offers.
Why This Moment Is Different From Apollo
The last humans to see the Moon up close were Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, who lifted off from the lunar surface on December 14, 1972, and returned to Earth five days later. Cernan, the last man to walk on the Moon, is reported to have said as he climbed the ladder back to the lunar module: 'We leave as we came, and, God willing, as we shall return.' It took 53 years. The world has changed almost beyond recognition in that time — the Cold War ended, the internet was born, smartphones put supercomputers in every pocket, and a pandemic reshaped global society. Space exploration lost its urgency, then its funding, then its momentum.
What Artemis represents — at its most ambitious — is the resumption of a project that was abandoned mid-sentence. The Apollo program did not end because humanity had learned everything there was to learn about the Moon. It ended because the geopolitical race that funded it was over. Artemis is different in motivation: it is driven by scientific interest in the lunar south pole, where water ice has been confirmed and may support long-duration human presence; by the strategic logic of establishing a permanent human presence in cislunar space before other spacefaring nations do; and by the longer-horizon goal of using the Moon as a proving ground for the systems and experience needed to eventually send humans to Mars.
What Comes After
If Artemis II succeeds — if the crew returns safely, if Orion performs as designed, if the SLS rocket demonstrates its reliability — the path forward accelerates dramatically. Artemis III, currently targeted for no earlier than 2027, will land astronauts on the lunar south pole for the first time in history. The lander will be SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System, a choice that created unexpected common ground between NASA's traditional architecture and the commercial space industry. Beyond Artemis III, NASA envisions a permanent lunar orbital station called Gateway and eventually a sustained surface presence — humans living and working on the Moon for months at a time.
That future depends entirely on what happens tomorrow evening at 6:24 PM EDT. If the countdown proceeds, if the engines ignite, if the SLS climbs off the pad and Orion separates cleanly and the crew settles in for their three-day journey to the Moon — everything changes. The species that left the Moon in December 1972 and forgot to go back will have found its way again.
There is something quietly extraordinary about the moment we are in. A world consumed by war, economic anxiety, political fracture, and environmental crisis is about to watch four people leave it behind — not metaphorically, but literally — and travel a quarter of a million miles to the vicinity of another world. Victor Glover and Christina Koch will not be the first Black man or the first woman to deserve to make this journey. They will simply be the first to get the chance. Jeremy Hansen will look back at the Earth from the vicinity of the Moon and see, as every astronaut who has made that view has described it, a fragile blue marble that contains everything and everyone that has ever mattered. And from that vantage point — 240,000 miles out, with the Sun on one side and the Moon filling the window on the other — the wars and the markets and the arguments will be exactly what they are: very small. Tomorrow, for ten days, four human beings will remind the rest of us what we are capable of when we decide to aim high enough.