CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — April 6, 2026
The Artemis 2 mission has achieved a historic milestone by reaching the farthest distance from Earth ever recorded during a crewed spaceflight, surpassing all previous records set during the Apollo era.
The four-person crew—NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen—launched from Cape Canaveral aboard the Orion capsule, propelled by the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. Their trajectory has taken them on a figure-eight path around Earth and the Moon, covering a staggering 2.3 million kilometers.
A New Benchmark in Space Exploration
The Artemis 2 mission marks the first time humans have ventured this far from Earth since the Apollo program. The Orion capsule has now entered a region where the Moon’s gravitational pull exceeds that of Earth, a critical milestone in the mission’s trajectory. This achievement underscores NASA’s renewed push to return humans to the lunar surface and eventually send them to Mars.
The United States remains the only country to have landed astronauts on the Moon, beginning with Neil Armstrong’s historic first steps on July 20, 1969, and ending with Eugene Cernan’s departure during Apollo 17 in December 1972. Artemis 2 serves as a precursor to Artemis 3, which aims to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by the late 2020s.