2026 Artemis II Moon Mission
By Brionna Gillis
Courtesy of Innovation News Network
NASA launched a space crew to the moon for the first time in 50 years.
NASA sent a crew of four astronauts on a 10 day voyage last week, with the mission of sending them to the moon and bringing them back. The Artemis II mission with commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and astronauts Christian Koch and Jeremy Hansen launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.
“It's super exciting to finally be here at the point where we’re finally sending people beyond the near orbit of the earth,” said William Moore, a Hampton University professor and the current chair of the Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department. “It's been a long time since anybody’s been out there, all the way to moon, not since the Apollo mission back in the 70s, so it's exciting to see NASA finally getting back to where we were 50 years ago and it's an important step on the way to actually putting people on the surface of the moon.”
Artemis II is NASA’s multidecade mission to return humans to the moon since the first moonlanding mission in the 1970s, and it plans to establish a longer term base there and eventually enable future human missions to Mars. NASA also hopes that the trip will pave the way for future Artemis missions and the building of a permanent lunar base.
The crew will be using NASA’s newest spacecraft, the Orion, which marks the first crewed flight atop NASA’s Space Launch System Rocket. This is said to be the most powerful booster in the world, and only its second flight overall.
“This is a test,” said Reid Wiseman. “When we get off the planet, we might come right back home. We might spend three or four days around Earth. We might go to the moon. That’s where we want to go but it’s a test mission and we are ready for every scenario as we ride this amazing Space Launch System in the Orion spacecraft, 250,000 miles away. It’s going to be amazing,” per CBS news.
The Orion will travel 685,000 miles over the next 10 days. Day one is the launch. Day two through four being the spacecraft heading towards the moon. Day 5 will be the lunar fly by. Day six through ten will see the return of the astronauts and re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
