Gearing Up For Artemis II: NASA's High-Stakes Test Run Around the Moon

NASA is gearing up for Artemis II, its first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo era—but this one is more of a high-speed dress rehearsal than a landing, according to KSL.com. Four astronauts will take a roughly 10-day trip that loops around the moon and comes straight back, with no orbiting or moonwalks.

The crew—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—marks a few firsts: the first woman, first person of color, and first non-American assigned to a lunar mission. Koch already holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, while Glover previously made history aboard the International Space Station. Hansen, representing Canada, is the only rookie in the group.

They’ll launch aboard NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket, with the Orion capsule on top. After liftoff, the plan is to spend about a day in an elongated orbit around Earth, practicing navigation by flying close to a spent rocket stage—without docking, just eyeballing the distance. As commander Wiseman put it, “Sometimes simple stuff is the best.”

KSL writes that from there, Orion will fire its engine and send the crew on a long arc toward the moon, roughly 244,000 miles away. Using a “free-return” trajectory—basically letting gravity do most of the work—they’ll swing around the far side and travel about 5,000 miles beyond it, farther than any humans have gone before. The moon will loom large during the flyby, and the crew is expected to document rarely seen regions of its far side.

After about six days, they’ll slingshot back toward Earth, wrapping up the mission with a Pacific Ocean splashdown just under 10 days after launch. Engineers will be paying close attention to Orion’s heat shield during reentry, since it took heavy damage during an earlier uncrewed test.

The mission hasn’t been perfectly smooth so far—fueling issues like hydrogen leaks have already caused delays—but Artemis II is still a crucial step. NASA ultimately wants to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and this flight is meant to prove they can get there—and back—safely.