Artemis II returns

A Moon flyby is the simplest way to send people to lunar distance without trying to land: you fire a spacecraft out of Earth orbit, let the Moon’s gravity bend the path, and bring the crew home. Artemis II used that playbook to send four astronauts around the Moon and back on April 1 to April 10, 2026, in NASA’s first crewed lunar mission since Apollo. (nasa.gov) The spacecraft was Orion, which is built to keep astronauts alive in deep space and then survive the trip back through Earth’s atmosphere. NASA says Orion’s job in Artemis is to carry crews to the Moon, sustain them there and on the way, and return them safely to Earth. (nasa.gov) The rocket was the Space Launch System, which is the heavy lifter that throws Orion out of low Earth orbit in one shot. NASA says it is the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts, and cargo directly to the Moon in a single launch. (nasa.gov) Artemis II lifted off from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time on April 1, 2026. The crew was Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. (nasa.gov) Getting to the Moon was not one straight burn. After launch, Orion first went into an elliptical Earth orbit, then climbed into a high Earth orbit about 46,000 miles up, and only after that fired its main engine for the translunar injection burn that sent it toward the Moon. (nasa.gov) That extra loop was there because Artemis II was a test flight, not a stunt. The crew used the first day to check life-support systems, deploy Orion’s solar arrays, switch over to the Deep Space Network for communications, and manually fly the spacecraft near the upper stage to see how Orion handled with humans aboard. (nasa.gov) The mission’s biggest number came on April 6, 2026, when the crew reached 248,655 miles from Earth. NASA says that beat the human distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. (nasa.gov) By splashdown, the crew had gone even farther from home at one point: 252,756 miles from Earth. NASA also says the full trip covered 694,481 miles. (nasa.gov) The mission ended at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time on Friday, April 10, 2026, when Orion splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego. A joint NASA and United States military recovery team pulled the capsule from open water, flew the astronauts by helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha, and sent them for initial medical checks. (nasa.gov) NASA lists the final mission duration as 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes. That is short by International Space Station standards, but it is long enough to prove that Orion can support a crew beyond Earth orbit, where there is no quick return lane and no nearby station to dock with. (nasa.gov) This flight was not the Moon landing. NASA says Artemis II was the first crewed flight of its deep-space system, and the point was to qualify the rocket, the spacecraft, the ground systems, and the human procedures before Artemis III tries to put astronauts on the lunar surface. (nasa.gov) That is why this return landed so hard with the public: the United States had not sent astronauts around the Moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972, and Artemis II just reopened that route with a four-person crew, a new spacecraft, and a live demonstration that the hardware worked all the way out and all the way back. (nasa.gov)