Artemis II is a crewed lunar flyby mission, which is the first human spaceflight of the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-led Artemis program. The mission's primary purpose is to test and validate the performance of the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with astronauts aboard in the deep space environment. The Artemis program was formally established in 2017 via Space Policy Directive-1, aiming to return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The mission, which launched on April 1, 2026, carried a crew of four astronauts—three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The mechanism involves the SLS rocket launching the Orion spacecraft into Earth orbit, where the crew performs system checkouts for about 42 hours. After clearance, the spacecraft is propelled toward the Moon on a free-return trajectory, a path that uses the Moon's gravity to slingshot the vehicle back to Earth, providing a built-in safety mechanism. The crew flew around the Moon, reaching a closest approach of about 4,067 miles from the lunar surface, and traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history, breaking the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. The mission lasted approximately 10 days before the crew and the Orion capsule, named Integrity, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.
Artemis II is a critical stepping stone that connects to the broader Artemis program, which seeks to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon as a foundation for future missions to Mars. It directly precedes Artemis III, which is planned to test docking procedures in Earth orbit, and Artemis IV, which is targeted to be the first crewed lunar landing of the program. Following the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022, engineers adjusted the re-entry profile for Artemis II to a faster, steeper path to address unexpected erosion on the Orion heat shield observed during the first flight. The core objective of testing the deep-space systems with a crew remained the same, but the mission's trajectory was modified to ensure the integrity of the spacecraft's thermal protection system.