NASA’s Artemis II Prepares to Send Astronauts Around the Moon for the First Time Since 1972

Countdown to a post-Apollo lunar flight

The 32-story rocket at the edge of the Atlantic was already alive hours before sunset, sheathed in white vapor as supercold propellants streamed into its tanks. Along the Florida coast, crowds lined the causeways and beaches, eyes fixed on Launch Complex 39B. High above the pad, four astronauts lay strapped into a gumdrop-shaped capsule named Integrity, waiting to attempt something no one has done in more than half a century: ride a U.S. spacecraft toward the moon.

NASA aimed to launch its Artemis II mission at 6:24 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday, the opening of a two-hour window that, if weather and hardware cooperated, would mark the first human voyage beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. The roughly 10-day flight will take the crew on a looping trajectory around the far side of the moon and back without landing—a high-stakes shakedown cruise for the agency’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

“Our flight systems are ready, the ground systems are ready, our launch and operations teams are ready,” Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said this week after a flight readiness review cleared the mission to proceed. A prelaunch weather briefing put the odds of acceptable conditions at about 80%, with forecasters watching for lingering cumulus clouds.

If the schedule holds, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen will become the first humans to see the moon up close in more than a generation. They will also carry a cluster of “firsts”: Glover is set to be the first Black astronaut on a lunar-bound mission, Koch the first woman, and Hansen, of the Canadian Space Agency, the first non-American.

The rocket, the trajectory, and what Artemis II must prove

The four ride atop NASA’s new moon rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS—a two-stage stack flanked by twin solid-fuel boosters and standing about 322 feet tall. At liftoff, its engines and boosters will produce more thrust than any other operational rocket in the world, enough to lift Orion and its crew to a parking orbit about 100 miles above Earth in roughly eight minutes.

From there, the mission profile diverges from Apollo’s. After a brief checkout in Earth orbit, the rocket’s upper stage will ignite for a trans-lunar injection burn, accelerating Orion to around 25,000 mph and sending it on a path toward the moon. The spacecraft will then separate and continue under its own power.

Over the next several days, the crew will test life-support systems, deep-space communications and navigation hardware in a radiation environment more intense than in low Earth orbit. Wiseman and Glover will practice manual flying and proximity operations—skills NASA plans to use later this decade when Orion must rendezvous and dock with commercial lunar landers and a small space station called Gateway.

Near the midpoint of the mission, Orion is expected to skim about 6,400 miles above the lunar far side, a vantage point that could carry the crew farther from Earth than any humans have ever traveled. Rather than braking into lunar orbit, the spacecraft will follow what engineers call a hybrid free-return trajectory. That path allows the moon’s gravity to bend Orion’s course back toward Earth, providing a built-in route home even if the capsule’s main engine failed later in the flight.

NASA says the conservative trajectory, combined with limited mission duration, reflects that Artemis II is primarily a test. “This is about proving that SLS and Orion can safely carry people into deep space and bring them home,” agency officials have said in recent briefings.

What Artemis I revealed—and the safety questions that followed

The vehicles have flown once before. In late 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission sent Orion to a distant orbit around the moon and back, demonstrating the rocket’s performance and the capsule’s heat shield during a 25,000 mph reentry. The flight was widely seen as successful but revealed problems that rippled into Artemis II.

Investigators found that Orion’s ablative heat shield charred and shed material in ways models had not predicted. A later report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General said the shield’s behavior, along with issues involving separation bolts and power distribution, posed “significant risks to the safety of the crew” unless fully understood. Safety advisers also pressed the agency to explain how it would address the anomalies before putting astronauts on board.

NASA chose not to redesign the heat shield from scratch. Instead, engineers refined their models, conducted additional testing and slightly adjusted Artemis II’s reentry profile to ease peak heating loads. The agency has insisted the system now meets safety requirements.

Delays, repairs, and a mounting bill

Schedule pressure has been compounded by hardware issues. In February, NASA rolled the fully stacked SLS and Orion back to the Vehicle Assembly Building to fix a helium flow problem in the upper stage and work on flight termination system batteries and valves related to Orion’s hatch pressurization. A blast of unusually cold weather earlier in the year had already pushed earlier target dates into the current early April window.

The pauses came against a backdrop of rising concern over cost. NASA’s inspector general has estimated that each of the first four SLS-Orion missions will cost about $4.1 billion in production and operations alone, calling the figure “unsustainable.” Including development, the Artemis program is projected to reach roughly $86 billion to $93 billion by the middle of the decade.

The spending supports a wide industrial base. The SLS core stage is assembled at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility outside New Orleans, where Boeing leads work on the vast liquid hydrogen and oxygen tanks and engine section. Orion is built by Lockheed Martin, with major assembly and testing in Colorado. NASA has said Artemis-related work supports about 69,000 jobs nationwide, many at small suppliers.

Those jobs have helped insulate the program in Congress. But new budget plans could tighten the screws. The administration’s proposed 2026 federal budget calls for a steep reduction in NASA’s overall funding compared with 2025 and directs agencies to eliminate formal diversity, equity and inclusion programs—even as Artemis highlights a more diverse astronaut corps as a central part of its story.

A new astronaut corps—and a new geopolitical contest

That story is one of the sharpest contrasts with the Apollo era. From 1968 to 1972, NASA sent 24 American men to orbit or walk on the moon. All were white, and almost all were military test pilots. At the time, civil rights leaders criticized the spectacle of moon launches as Black Americans struggled with poverty and inequality. Days before Apollo 11 lifted off, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy led a protest at the gates of Kennedy Space Center, arguing the money would be better spent on housing and jobs.

Artemis II’s crew is being cast, in part, as a reply. Koch spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station, setting the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman and joining fellow astronaut Jessica Meir on the first all-female spacewalks. Glover, a Navy test pilot, became the first Black astronaut to live on the station for a long-duration mission in 2020 and 2021. He has said he does not dwell on being “the first” but views his presence as a signal of who NASA serves.

“We work for them too,” he said in a recent interview, referring to taxpayers who may not see themselves reflected in earlier missions.

Hansen’s assignment stems from Canada’s decision to contribute Canadarm3, a robotic arm, to the planned Gateway station in lunar orbit. In exchange, Ottawa secured a seat on Artemis II, making him the first non-American astronaut named to a lunar mission.

Above the astronauts and politics is a broader strategic calculation. Artemis is the U.S. implementation of Space Policy Directive 1, signed in 2017, which ordered NASA to “lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners” and to return humans to the moon before heading to Mars. To support that effort, Washington has promoted the Artemis Accords, a set of principles for exploration that reinterpret the 1967 Outer Space Treaty for an era of commercial mining and “safety zones” around lunar sites.

Sixty-one countries spanning every inhabited continent have now signed the accords. China and Russia have refused, criticizing them as a U.S.-centric attempt to set rules outside the United Nations system. Instead, they are promoting an International Lunar Research Station later in the 2030s and say they aim to land Chinese astronauts on the moon before 2030.

Recent reports to Congress and independent reviews have warned that China could overtake the United States as “the top nation in space” within five to 10 years if NASA’s funding erodes. For those officials, a visible, crewed mission around the moon with a Canadian on board and dozens of countries in the broader Artemis coalition is not just a technical test but a signal.

What comes next for Artemis

Artemis II is also a hinge for the rest of the program. Artemis I proved that SLS and Orion could operate together without a crew. Artemis II, if successful, would clear the way for a reworked sequence of missions. NASA now plans Artemis III as an Earth-orbit rendezvous and docking exercise between Orion and a commercial lunar lander, rather than the first return to the lunar surface. Crew landings at the moon’s south pole are now expected no earlier than 2028 on Artemis IV and V, depending on the readiness of SpaceX’s Starship-based Human Landing System and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander.

NASA’s inspector general reported this year that while the human landing system contracts have largely stayed within their original cost bounds, delays and technical risks surround both landers, and key safety questions remain.

Public support for these ambitions is solid but not overwhelming. Surveys in recent years have found that large majorities of Americans view NASA favorably and back exploration in general. Far fewer—about 1 in 10 to 1 in 7 respondents—rank sending astronauts back to the moon as the agency’s top priority, favoring missions closer to home such as tracking climate change or deflecting hazardous asteroids. When asked directly, however, most say they support returning to the moon and eventually going to Mars.

A narrow window

As the countdown clocks tick down at Kennedy, those mixed feelings, budget pressures and geopolitical rivalries all converge on a single, narrow window. If the weather cooperates and no last-minute technical issue halts the count, four astronauts will ride a pillar of fire off the Florida coast and arc east over the Atlantic, chasing a path last flown before any of them were born.

Within minutes, they will leave the thick blue band of the atmosphere that has bounded human travel since the end of Apollo. Within days, they could see the far side of the moon with their own eyes. Whether this marks the beginning of a sustained, international return to deep space or an expensive detour will be decided in budgets, boardrooms and legislatures over the years to come. For now, the test is simple and unforgiving: light the engines, fly the mission, come home.