252,760 miles. That was the distance from Earth, 406,778 kilometres, that NASA’s Artemis II crew was due to reach on 6 April 2026, about 4,105 miles (6,606 kilometres) past the mark held since Apollo 13. TRT World reported that the four astronauts passed the old record on Monday, before the peak of their lunar flyby.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, had been flying in their Orion capsule since lifting off from Florida the previous week. They woke around 10:50 am ET on their sixth flight day to a recording from Jim Lovell, the late Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 astronaut, who died last year at 97.
“Welcome to my old neighbourhood,” Lovell said. “It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be, but don’t forget to enjoy the view… good luck and godspeed.”
Six hours behind the Moon
The flyby was set to begin officially at 2:34 pm ET. Once the Moon sat between Orion and NASA’s Deep Space Network, the crew would lose contact for a time. Guinness World Records later put the blackout at 40 minutes.
The pass lasted about six hours. The astronauts planned to shoot detailed photos through Orion’s window from roughly 4,000 miles above the dark lunar surface, with Earth hanging in the background at about the size of a basketball. Dozens of lunar scientists in the Science Evaluation Room at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston listened to the crew describe what they saw and took notes as it happened.
Photos released afterward showed the Moon fully covering the Sun, as well as the distant Earth.
Records still being counted
Guinness World Records has since added figures of its own. By the Guinness count, the Artemis II crew exceeded the altitude record that Apollo 13 set on 15 April 1970, and reached around 252,756 miles from Earth. Koch extended her own records for the longest continuous time in space by a woman and the highest altitude reached by a woman.
Spaceflight consultant Jonathan McDowell worked out one more mark. At 10:22 p.m. UTC that day, the Artemis crew, nearing the far point of their path, were 419,656 km (260,761 miles) from the three-person crew of China’s Tiangong station, which was passing about 425 km above New Orleans on the opposite side of the planet. Tiangong’s crew are Zhang Lu, Wu Fei and Zhang Hongzhang. McDowell’s estimate for the largest distance from the centre of the Earth is 413145 km, reached at 2304 UTC.
The title of most isolated human is still Alfred Worden’s. He flew the command module on Apollo 15 in 1971 and was 3,596.4 km from his nearest living fellow human while David Scott and James Irwin worked on the surface.
What the mission is for
The flight is the first crewed test of NASA’s Artemis program and lasts nearly 10 days. The multibillion-dollar series is meant to put astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2028, ahead of China, and to build a moon base that could serve as a proving ground for later trips to Mars.
Sources
- Artemis astronauts break record for farthest distance between humans during epic mission
- TRT World – Artemis astronauts break record for farthest human spaceflight
