On April 6th, 2026, four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft flew behind the Moon and saw things no human has ever seen.
For 40 minutes, they lost all contact with Earth. What they found on the far side is deeply unsettling. The Artemis II crew, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, completed a seven-hour lunar flyby that broke the record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth.
They became the first people to see the entire lunar far side, a landscape so different from the near side that scientists still can't fully explain why. Buried beneath the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest crater in the solar system, lies a mysterious mass five times the size of Hawaii.
A block of granite that shouldn't exist is radiating heat from 3.5 billion years ago. Sealed lava tubes stretch beneath the surface. And the crust on the far side is 50 kilometers thicker than the near side, for reasons no one agrees on. In this video, we cover everything the Artemis II crew observed during their historic flyby, the science behind the Moon's far side, and why what they found changes our understanding of our closest neighbor.