Four astronauts are preparing to blast off from Florida tonight aboard NASA's Artemis II mission, marking the first time humans have traveled toward the moon since the Apollo program ended more than half a century ago. The ten-day flight will carry the crew around the far side of the moon and back, no landing, but a distance no human has reached since 1970.
The crew will ride atop the Space Launch System rocket, a machine standing just over 98 meters tall and generating 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, the equivalent, The Sun reported, of eight Boeing 747s at full power. Their home for the journey: the Orion capsule, roughly the size of a garden shed.
That capsule will carry Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen approximately 250,000 miles from Earth. If they reach that distance, they will break the record set by the Apollo 13 astronauts in 1970. They will re-enter Earth's atmosphere at just over 25,000 miles per hour.
Wiseman, 50, is a former U.S. Navy test pilot from Maryland and the oldest member of the crew, two months senior to Hansen. He has teenage daughters, Katherine and Ellie. He will also become the oldest person to travel to the moon.
Glover, a California-born former Navy pilot with three master's degrees, previously served as pilot on a SpaceX mission and spent time aboard the International Space Station. He is married with four children. Koch, an engineer and physicist from Michigan now living in Texas, holds the record for the longest time in space by a woman, 328 days on the ISS beginning in March 2019. She also spent a year in Antarctica.
Hansen, a former Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot, is the only non-American in the crew. He has been an astronaut since 2009, and has never been to space. He is married with three children. The crew completed two weeks of isolation ahead of tonight's launch.
The Washington Times reported the flight is expected to last nine days, one hour, and 46 minutes. The mission uses a free-return trajectory, taking Orion about 5,000 miles beyond the moon before swinging back toward Earth. Wiseman offered a simple take on the plan: "Sometimes simple stuff is the best."
The Artemis program has cost an estimated $93 billion since its establishment in 2017. That figure will only grow. NASA plans a $20 billion base on the moon's south pole, where scientists hope to find ice, and therefore water. Regular landings are planned from early 2028.
The agency's roadmap calls for Artemis III to conduct further tests in Earth's orbit next year. Artemis IV, planned for 2028, would put humans back on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. NASA cleared Artemis II for launch after years of delays and technical setbacks that tested public patience with the program.
The unmanned Artemis I launched in November 2022 as a dry run. Its only passenger was a test dummy named Commander Moonikin Campos. Tonight's flight carries the real thing.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, reflecting on the original space race against the Soviet Union that put Americans on the moon in 1969, framed the mission in terms that go well beyond a flyby.
"This time, the goal is not flags and footprints. This time, the goal is to stay."
For all the ambition, the mission carries real risk. The New York Post reported that experts have flagged concerns about the Orion heat shield, life-support systems being tested with a crew for the first time, possible hydrogen fuel leaks, radiation exposure beyond low-Earth orbit, and reentry parachute reliability.
Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell put it plainly: "This is the second flight of a substantially new rocket and the first time with people on it. And so that's always a concerning thing." He added that while the team has experience, "they haven't done this in a while."
The hydrogen leak issue is not new. NASA previously postponed the lunar mission over exactly that problem, pushing the timeline back before the agency ultimately gave the green light to proceed.
The National Review documented the final preparations at Kennedy Space Center, where the Orion capsule was stacked atop the SLS rocket at Pad 39B ahead of launch. The imagery captures both the scale of the hardware and the weight of the moment, the first crewed vehicle pointed at the moon in more than five decades.
NASA geologist Kelsey Young captured the broader appeal: "The moon is like such a unifying thing. What we're doing with this mission is going to bring that a little closer to everybody around the world."
The crew will travel about 1,500 miles farther than any previous human flight. NASA plans to stream the mission live on its YouTube channel. For ten days, four people will share a capsule the size of a shed, hurtling around the far side of the moon at speeds that make a commercial jet look parked.
The Artemis program has burned through $93 billion in less than a decade. The technical setbacks have been real. The delays have been long. But tonight, four Americans and one Canadian will strap into a rocket in Florida and do something no human has done since Richard Nixon was president.
Taxpayers have a right to ask hard questions about the cost. They also have a right to expect that when their government spends this kind of money, it aims for something worth doing. Putting Americans back on the path to the moon, with the goal of staying, qualifies.
