More than 50 years after the last Apollo missions, people have traveled around the Moon again and returned safely to Earth. NASA’s Artemis II mission launched on April 1, 2026, and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10. The four astronauts were Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. This was the first crewed Artemis mission and the first human lunar flyby in over half a century. (nasa.gov)

Artemis II did not land on the Moon. It was a test flight to check NASA’s Orion spacecraft and SLS rocket with astronauts on board for the first time. During the mission, Orion flew about 4,067 miles above the Moon at its closest point. At its farthest point from Earth, the crew reached 252,756 miles from home, farther than any humans had traveled before. NASA says this passed the old record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The full mission lasted 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes. (nasa.gov)

The return trip was one of the most dramatic parts of the mission. Orion came back through Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 35 times the speed of sound before landing under parachutes at 5:07 p.m. PDT. After splashdown, recovery teams helped the astronauts out of the spacecraft and took them to the USS John P. Murtha for medical checks. NASA’s first early inspections say the heat shield worked as expected, and engineers are now studying the data from the flight. Artemis II is important because it shows that NASA is getting closer to future missions, including Artemis III and later trips to the Moon and Mars. For many people, Artemis II felt like a message from the future: the Moon is no longer only history. It is a destination again. (nasa.gov)