POW Boom, zoom to the moon, Artemis II is a lunar flyby under NASA's Artemis program, launching on April 1, 2026.
The ten-day mission will carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a free-return trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth. Artemis II will be the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Artemis II is expected to set several human spaceflight records. Glover will become the first person of color, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-US citizen to travel beyond low Earth orbit. At a distance of roughly 4,700 miles (7,600 km) beyond the Moon, and at an atmospheric reentry speed of approximately 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 km/h), Artemis II is set to become the farthest and fastest crewed spaceflight by a narrow margin.
Artemis II is a flight test for the Artemis IV lunar landing, planned to return humans to the Moon in 2028. Artemis II was originally designated Exploration Mission-2 (EM-2) and initially intended to support the now-canceled Asteroid Redirect Mission, proposed in 2013. EM-2's objectives were revised following the establishment of the Artemis program in 2017. Artemis II's objectives are comparable to those of Apollo 8, the first lunar mission of the Apollo program, which took place in 1968.
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