The last time a human being ventured beyond low Earth orbit was December 1972, when Gene Cernan climbed back into the Apollo 17 lunar module and left the Moon’s surface for the final time. That was fifty-three years ago. An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had children of their own without a single person traveling farther than the International Space Station — a mere 250 miles above Earth’s surface.
That drought is about to end. NASA’s Artemis II mission will send four astronauts around the Moon in a flight that represents not just a technical milestone, but a symbolic reclaiming of humanity’s capacity for deep-space exploration. Here’s everything you need to know about the mission, the crew, and what comes after.
Why Did It Take 53 Years?
The short answer is money, politics, and an unbroken string of canceled programs. After Apollo, NASA pivoted to the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Both were extraordinarily ambitious, but they kept human spaceflight confined to low Earth orbit. The Shuttle flew from 1981 to 2011 and cost roughly $200 billion over its lifetime. There simply wasn’t budget left for deep space.
The longer answer involves a series of false starts. George H.W. Bush proposed a Moon base in 1989 — Congress killed it over cost. George W. Bush launched the Constellation program in 2005, developing the Orion capsule and a new rocket called Ares. Obama canceled Ares in 2010 but kept Orion. Congress then mandated the Space Launch System (SLS) as Ares’s replacement.
The result is that Orion has survived four presidencies and twenty years of development to reach this point. The SLS rocket itself traces back even further — its RS-25 engines, solid rocket boosters, and the iconic orange external tank design are all evolved Space Shuttle components. Reusing that industrial base kept Congressional funding flowing because the jobs stayed in the same states and districts that had built the Shuttle.
The Mission: What Artemis II Actually Does
Artemis II is a ten-day mission. Four astronauts launch from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39B — the same launch complex that sent Apollo missions to the Moon — aboard the most powerful rocket ever built. The crew:
- Commander Reid Wiseman — U.S. Navy test pilot and veteran ISS commander
- Pilot Victor Glover — who becomes the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit
- Mission Specialist Christina Koch — who becomes the first woman to fly around the Moon
- Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen — a Canadian Space Agency fighter pilot who becomes the first non-American to venture that far from Earth
The mission profile uses what’s called a multi-trans-lunar injection — multiple engine firings while still in Earth orbit to build up speed, rather than a single powerful burn. This approach allows the crew to thoroughly check out Orion’s systems in the relative safety of Earth orbit first. If something goes wrong during those initial orbits, they can come home quickly.
Once all systems check out, they commit to the final burn toward the Moon, entering a free-return trajectory. This is a critical safety feature: the flight path uses the Moon’s gravity to sling the spacecraft around the far side and back toward Earth automatically. Even if the engines failed completely after that final burn, gravity alone would bring them home — precisely the same principle that saved the crew of Apollo 13.
At its farthest point, the crew will swing approximately 6,400 miles behind the far side of the Moon — farther from Earth than any human has ever traveled. When they return, Orion will hit Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 25,000 miles per hour — Mach 32.
The Heat Shield Question
That screaming reentry is one of the most critical things Artemis II will test, and it comes with a backstory. During Artemis I — the uncrewed test flight in 2022 — the heat shield experienced unexpected charring. Chunks of ablative material came off in ways engineers didn’t predict. NASA spent over a year investigating the anomaly and determined that the issue was related to gas flow through gaps in the heat shield during reentry.
Modifications have been made and extensive ground testing completed, but Artemis II will be the definitive proof with humans aboard. This is partly why the mission exists in the first place — testing life support, navigation, communications, and especially that heat shield before attempting a lunar landing. The crew will manually fly portions of the mission, verify the ECLSS life support system, and confirm that communications work reliably at lunar distance.
This is not a joyride. It’s a genuine test flight.
Artemis III: Boots on the Regolith
The landing mission — Artemis III — officially targets mid-2027, but most space analysts expect it closer to 2028 or later. SpaceX’s internal timeline reportedly has a crewed lunar landing attempt around September 2028.
The reason SpaceX matters for a NASA mission is that the lunar lander for Artemis III is SpaceX’s Starship — specifically a variant called the Human Landing System (HLS). The mission architecture is audacious: Orion flies the crew to lunar orbit, they transfer into a Starship that’s already parked there, ride it down to the surface, conduct moonwalks, ride Starship back up to orbit, transfer back into Orion, and fly home to Earth.
Getting that Starship to lunar orbit is the hard part. Starship can’t carry enough fuel to reach the Moon on its own, so SpaceX must perform orbital refueling first — launching a tanker version of Starship multiple times to fill up the lunar variant in Earth orbit before it departs for the Moon. Current estimates suggest ten to fifteen tanker flights will be required.
SpaceX is supposed to demonstrate propellant transfer by mid-2026 and complete an uncrewed Starship lunar landing by mid-2027. Neither milestone has been achieved yet. And the spacesuits are another variable — Axiom Space is building new moonwalking suits called the AxEMU, far more advanced than Apollo-era suits with improved mobility, longer life support duration, and built-in HD cameras.
The landing site will be the lunar south pole, near Shackleton Crater. This region is scientifically extraordinary because permanently shadowed craters there contain water ice — deposits in places that haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years. Water ice means drinking water, breathable oxygen, and potentially even rocket fuel, all derived from lunar resources. That’s the entire premise of sustainable exploration: you don’t ship everything from Earth — you learn to live off the land.
Apollo’s astronauts reported that lunar dust was one of the worst problems they encountered. The fine, jagged particles — never eroded smooth by weather — jammed zippers, scratched helmet visors, and irritated lungs. Gene Cernan called it one of his biggest concerns. Modern suits must solve this challenge for missions lasting far longer than Apollo’s brief surface stays.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory: Photographing Alien Earths
While Artemis dominates the near-term space calendar, NASA announced in January 2026 an equally revolutionary long-term project: the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). This is the most ambitious telescope concept NASA has ever proposed. The goal is to directly photograph Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars and then analyze their atmospheres for signs of life.
The James Webb Space Telescope has imaged a few giant exoplanets — Jupiter-sized worlds far from their stars. But an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone is billions of times fainter than its host star. Detecting it is like spotting a firefly next to a lighthouse from a thousand miles away.
HWO would achieve this through two key technologies. First, a massive primary mirror — six to eight meters in diameter, comparable to Webb’s 6.5-meter mirror. Second, a next-generation coronagraph — an instrument that blocks the star’s light with extraordinary precision to reveal the faint planet beside it. NASA says the coronagraph needs to be thousands of times more capable than any space coronagraph ever flown. The optical system must remain stable to within the width of a single atom during observations. Any vibration larger than that ruins the image.
NASA awarded contracts to seven companies — including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3Harris, and BAE Systems — for three years of critical technology development. The telescope would launch to the L2 point (like Webb) in the late 2030s or 2040s. But unlike Webb, which was designed as essentially untouchable once launched, HWO would be built for in-space servicing and upgrades — new instruments, new cameras, even mirror repairs.
The science potential is staggering. The goal is to characterize at least 25 potentially habitable worlds. If you find oxygen, water vapor, and methane in the same atmosphere — a combination extremely difficult to produce without biology — you’d have chemical biosignatures indicating an entire biosphere. Not a picture of an alien waving, but the fingerprint of life itself.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman called it “the kind of bold, forward-leaning science that only NASA can undertake.”
The Big Picture
Right now, a 322-foot rocket sits on a Florida launchpad preparing to send four humans around the Moon for the first time in over half a century. Simultaneously, engineers are designing a telescope that could find evidence of life on another world. The hardware is physically on the pad. The crew is trained. The countdown is coming.
And the human element matters alongside the engineering. Four people looking out a window at the far side of the Moon — closer than anyone in five decades. The first woman. The first Black astronaut in deep space. The first Canadian. These aren’t just technical milestones. They’re symbols of who gets to explore, and who exploration is for.
After fifty-three years, we’re going back. And this time, we’re building the foundation to stay.