Artemis II: crewed moon flyby noted
NASA has described Artemis II as the agency’s first crewed lunar flyby in 50 years, and media coverage noted the mission carried a four-person crew on a roughly 10-day journey around the Moon. (translate.google.com) News outlets framed the mission as a milestone in the current human-spaceflight cycle. (abcnews.com)
NASA’s Artemis II flew four astronauts around the Moon and back in April 2026, putting people on a lunar flyby for the first time since Apollo. (nasa.gov) NASA lists the mission as a 9-day, 1-hour, 32-minute flight that launched on April 1, 2026, and splashed down on April 10. The crew was Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. (nasa.gov) The spacecraft was Orion, launched on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA said the test flight was designed to check the capsule’s life-support, navigation, communications, and reentry systems with people aboard before later Moon missions. (nasa.gov) A lunar flyby is not a landing. The spacecraft loops around the Moon using its gravity, then heads back to Earth, which lets engineers test deep-space travel without sending astronauts to the surface. (nasa.gov) That distinction is central to the Artemis program’s sequence. Artemis I flew Orion without a crew in 2022, Artemis II added astronauts for the first crewed deep-space test flight in more than 50 years, and NASA says later Artemis missions are meant to return crews to the lunar surface. (nasa.gov) The mission also marked the first crewed flight of Orion and the first use of that spacecraft’s European Service Module with astronauts aboard. The European Space Agency says the service module supplied power, propulsion, air, and water during the trip. (esa.int) NASA released lunar flyby images taken on April 6, including views of the Moon’s far side and a crescent Earth near the lunar horizon. NASA said Orion lost contact with Earth for about 40 minutes while passing behind the Moon, a planned communications blackout caused by the Moon blocking the signal. (nasa.gov) The crew lineup carried its own firsts. Glover became the first Black astronaut on a lunar mission, Koch became the first woman assigned to one, and Hansen became the first Canadian to fly to the Moon. (nasa.gov) NASA describes Artemis II as a step toward its next lunar missions, which pair Orion with SpaceX’s Human Landing System and other hardware still in development. The flyby closed with a Pacific Ocean splashdown, returning the program from test objectives in documents to a completed crewed mission. (nasa.gov)
