NASA Is Preparing to Launch the Artemis II Moon Mission. Here Is Everything You Need to Know — Including What Goes Wrong

The fact that NASA launched its most important crewed mission in more than fifty years on April 1st has an almost uncomfortable poetic quality. By no means is this a joke. At 6:35 p.m. Eastern time on April 1, 2026, a Space Launch System rocket took off from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, transporting four astronauts into a location that had not been visited by humans since 1972. Something must have caused the roar.

It’s the kind of moment you don’t quite believe is real until the rocket clears the tower, with the crowds watching from the causeway and the engineers in Mission Control holding their breath.

Artemis II’s crew, which included Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen and NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, flew by the moon for about ten days. They were not making landings. That’s for later.

This was the test run, the shakedown cruise, the mission intended to demonstrate that Orion and all of its components could truly sustain human life in deep space.

Despite its technical description as a “crewed test flight,” what actually happened was truly historic. On April 6, the crew traveled 252,760 miles from Earth, more than any human in history, surpassing the record set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. It’s not a footnote. That headline should have received more attention than it did.

The lunar flyby moment was the focal point of the mission’s schedule. The crew observed the Moon’s near and far sides for seven hours, starting live coverage at 1 p.m. Due to Orion’s limited windows, the four astronauts rotated like a well-trained crew on a submarine, with two of them observing while the other two exercised or handled other duties. They were 4,067 miles from the lunar surface when they made their closest approach at 7 p.m.

The Moon would appear to be about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length from that distance. It’s possible that some of the crew members were the first people to see portions of the Moon’s far side with the unaided eye. The science team examined their imagery overnight and conducted a debriefing the next morning while the experience was still fresh, though it’s still unclear exactly what they saw.

But in order to get there, a problem that very few people outside of NASA truly understood had to be solved. The Orion capsule’s heat shield sustained more damage than anyone had predicted when the unmanned Artemis I mission returned in 2022. The shield protects the crew from temperatures that can reach 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit during reentry, when the spacecraft plunges back into the atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, surrounded by air that is so heated and compressed that it practically turns to plasma.

After years of examining the damage, engineers created a completely new reentry trajectory for Artemis II. Artemis I stopped using the double-dip skip-entry technique. The quiet, unglamorous grind of redesigning a trajectory after a problem that most people weren’t even informed about seems to be the true story here.

“Return to the Moon,” a NOVA documentary directed by British filmmaker Tim Lambert, tells that story, at least in part. The night after splashdown, on April 15, it debuted on PBS and delves deeper into the engineering difficulties of the Artemis program than the mission’s own media coverage frequently did.

Lambert, who was awakened as a child in England to witness the Apollo 11 landing in 1969, says that reading NASA’s May 2024 Inspector General report was a pivotal moment for the production. He said, “No one really had any sense of how serious the capsule issue was,” and it’s almost comforting that a documentary filmmaker had to clarify that.

The actual Splashdown, which took place on April 10 off the coast of San Diego, has its own history and near-disaster. Reentry science is surprisingly complicated. The capsule is slowed from supersonic speeds to a manageable 80 feet per second prior to impact with the ocean by the sequential deployment of parachutes, which are first drag chutes and then the main canopy array, each with a diameter of more than 100 feet.

It turns out that water is perfect for this because it has a high surface coverage, low viscosity, and enough give to absorb the shock without damaging the car. After recovering the crew by helicopter, recovery teams moved them to the USS John P. Murtha for post-mission medical assessments.

It’s important to keep in mind that splashdowns haven’t always been successful. After his Liberty Bell 7 capsule crashed in the Atlantic in July 1961, astronaut Gus Grissom almost drowned when a hatch blew too soon. In his spacesuit, he hadn’t shut off a valve. As he struggled to stay afloat, water poured in, alerting the helicopter pilot to the seriousness of the situation. He barely made it out alive, and the incident changed engineers’ perceptions of post-splashdown procedure forever.

The ghost of Grissom’s capsule likely lingered in some minds at Mission Control sixty-five years later, with Orion’s heat shield under scrutiny and a redesigned trajectory untested with crew aboard.

According to NASA, the Artemis II mission serves as a test bed for all future developments, including a long-term lunar presence, potential surface landings, and the longer trajectory of human spaceflight beyond this decade.

It is genuinely unclear if that ambitious future will materialize on time. However, four people orbited the moon for ten days in early April, shattering a fifty-year record and returning home without incident. That’s what took place. And that’s something to cling to, at least.