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There's a 322-foot rocket sitting on a launchpad in Florida right now, pointed at the Moon. Inside its capsule is an SD card containing the names of millions of ordinary people from around the world who signed up — perhaps on a whim, perhaps with tears in their eyes — to send their name somewhere no human has been in over half a century.
That rocket is NASA's Space Launch System. The mission is Artemis II. And if all goes to plan, sometime in early March, four astronauts will become the first human beings to leave Earth's orbit since December 1972 — when the last Apollo mission came home, the program was cancelled, and humanity quietly shelved its greatest achievement.
Fifty-four years is a long time to wait.
A Crew for the History Books
The four people strapped into Orion's crew capsule when it finally lifts off will make history in more ways than one.
Commander Reid Wiseman, a former Navy test pilot and seasoned ISS veteran, will lead the mission. Pilot Victor Glover becomes the first person of color to travel beyond Earth's orbit. Mission specialist Christina Koch — who already holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, having spent 328 consecutive days aboard the ISS — will become the first woman to venture to the Moon. And rounding out the crew is Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, the first non-American ever to leave low Earth orbit.
The mission patch says "AII" — standing both for "Artemis II" and the idea of exploration that is "for all and by all." It's a sentiment that, for once, doesn't feel like marketing.
When asked whether he feels the weight of history as the launch draws near, Wiseman reportedly joked that until recently, he didn't. That lightness won't last. History has a way of landing on people.
What They're Actually Doing Up There
Artemis II is not a Moon landing. It's important to be clear about that. The crew won't set foot on the lunar surface. What they will do is arguably more important, and certainly more dangerous.
Over approximately ten days, the Orion spacecraft will carry the crew on a figure-eight trajectory around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth — a "free-return" path that uses the Moon's own gravity to slingshot the capsule homeward, the same elegant mechanic that saved the crew of Apollo 13.
The outbound journey to the Moon will take about three days. The crew will then swing around the lunar far side — portions of which no human eye has observed up close — before spending roughly a day in observation. Then four more days back to Earth, ending with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego.
At its furthest point, the crew will travel more than 230,000 miles from Earth, surpassing the distance record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. They will re-enter Earth's atmosphere at around 25,000 miles per hour — faster than any crewed spacecraft ever has.
The mission's primary purpose is to test Orion and the Space Launch System in the real, harsh conditions of deep space, with actual human beings aboard. Life support. Communications. The heat shield. The navigation systems. All of it gets put through its paces in an environment that forgives nothing.
Tucked into the payload is also something called AVATAR — a system of organ-on-a-chip devices that mimics human tissue, designed to study how increased radiation and microgravity affect the human body beyond the protective cocoon of Earth's magnetic field. It's quiet, unglamorous science, but it could prove essential for the longer missions ahead.
Why It Took So Long
The obvious question — one that haunts anyone who watched the Apollo footage in school — is why it took this long.
The honest answer is complicated. Budget politics gutted NASA's momentum after Apollo. The Space Shuttle era was transformational in its own way but kept humans tethered to low Earth orbit. Later, the Constellation program, which was meant to return humans to the Moon by 2020, was cancelled under the Obama administration after ballooning costs and schedule overruns. The Artemis program — Constellation's successor — inherited those delays and added a few of its own, including a troubled heat shield design that engineers have debated right up to launch, and a liquid hydrogen fuel leak during pre-launch testing that pushed the targeted window from February to March.
But it's happening. The rocket is on the pad. The crew is in quarantine.
What Comes Next
Artemis II is a beginning, not a destination.
Assuming it goes well, Artemis III — the actual Moon landing — is currently planned for 2027. That mission will see astronauts touch down near the lunar south pole, a region of extraordinary scientific interest because of permanently shadowed craters believed to contain water ice. The presence of water changes everything: it means fuel, it means oxygen, it means the possibility of a sustained human presence beyond Earth.
And beyond the Moon sits Mars — the stated long-term goal of NASA's deep space program, and the private obsession of figures like Elon Musk. Artemis II is, in this sense, not merely a mission to a celestial body. It's the first rung of a ladder humanity is only just beginning to climb again.
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Why It Still Matters
Space exploration has a complicated reputation these days. It lives awkwardly beside the billionaire ego trips of private spaceflight, the bureaucratic inertia of large government agencies, and a public increasingly attuned to the size of problems closer to home.
But there is something about this mission — four people heading somewhere no human has been since before most people reading this were born — that cuts through the noise.
The Moon is not a metaphor. It hangs in the same sky it always has, 239,000 miles away, indifferent to politics or budgets or the news cycle. And in a few weeks, four human beings will leave everything they know behind, travel to its neighbourhood, and look down at our entire world from a distance that makes all of it — every country, every conflict, every city — fit in the palm of a hand.
That still means something. It always will.
