Four astronauts, a capsule named Integrity, and a flight path that bends around the Moon without ever settling into orbit. That is Artemis II, the second mission of NASA’s Artemis program and the first with people on board, as the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum describes it.
The crew is commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen. Apollo launched three people at a time. Artemis puts four in the capsule. NASA was aiming for liftoff on Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in a 120-minute window that opens at 6:24 pm, with backup windows set between April 2 and April 6.
A test flight, not a landing
The mission runs 10 days and exercises three pieces of hardware at once: the ground systems that launch and recover rockets and spacecraft, the SLS rocket, and the Orion capsule. Artemis I flew without a crew in 2022. This time the question is how Orion’s life-support systems behave with astronauts breathing the air, which matters because NASA wants to send crews on longer trips as the program goes on.
The closest historical match is Apollo 8, the first Apollo flight to carry humans to the Moon. There is one difference. Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit. Artemis II loops past the Moon and keeps going.
It is expected to take the record for the farthest humans have traveled from Earth, currently held by Apollo 13 at 248,655 miles. Orion will pass more than 4,000 miles beyond the Moon on the far side of its loop.
The ten days
On the first day the crew circles Earth, first in low orbit and then in a high elliptical one, and spends 23 hours checking out Orion. They stay close to home on purpose, so any surprise can be dealt with near Earth. They also get a chance to fly the capsule by hand.
Day two brings the trans-lunar injection burn from Orion’s main engine. It sends the spacecraft on a figure-eight path with a built-in safety net: lunar gravity will pull Orion back toward Earth even if the engine fails. Days three through five are a coast, and the capsule enters the Moon’s sphere of influence on day five.
The flyby comes on day six. Orion makes its closest approach to the Moon and, at the same time, reaches its greatest distance from Earth. The crew will photograph the far side and make observations. On days seven to nine the spacecraft heads home and fires the first two return correction burns.
Day ten is the final correction burn, the reentry checklist, and the separation of the crew module from the service module. Three main parachutes slow the capsule before it lands in the Pacific, where a U.S. Navy ship picks up Integrity and its crew.
The hardware
Orion has been in development for over 20 years and began under an earlier program called Constellation. The crew picked the name Integrity to honor the trust among the people behind the mission, and the name also nods to the job of joining more than 300,000 individual components into one spacecraft.
The SLS rocket first flew in November 2022. It produces 8.8 million pounds of thrust, which is 15% more than the Saturn V Moon rocket. Two minutes after liftoff the solid rocket boosters drop away into the ocean, and unlike the shuttle’s boosters, they will not be recovered. The core stage separates eight minutes after launch and falls back over the Pacific.
The crew will wear a mission patch reading AII on the sleeves of their Orion Crew Survival System suits. A red line that forms the A traces the flight path around both Earth and Moon.
Sources
Sources
- Artemis II: NASA’s First Crewed Lunar Flyby in 50 Years – NASA
- What is Artemis II? | National Air and Space Museum
