NASA’s Artemis II mission launches four astronauts to the moon

The program architecture now includes another crewed flight in the sequence, an increased cadence of missions to the moon and, in the future, a decreased reliance on the budget-busting and finicky SLS to get there. Like the crew of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission from 1968, the astronauts of Artemis II won’t reach the lunar surface; at closest approach, the Orion capsule will still be between 4,000 and 6,000 miles above the moon. It is, after all, the first time most of us will watch as humans return to the moon’s vicinity—although scholars note that overall public awareness of the Artemis II mission is much lower than for the Apollo flights, in part because “we are living in a booming space age that doesn’t necessarily pierce the public consciousness each time some Starlink satellites go up,” Weitekamp says.

Author: Nadia Drake

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