Artemis II: The First Crewed Lunar Flyby Since 1972

Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026 on NASA's Space Launch System rocket, carrying four astronauts around the Moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. The mission lasted 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes and ended with a Pacific Ocean splashdown.^[1]

The splashdown time is often written two different ways, which looks like a contradiction but is not. NASA records it as 8:07 p.m. EDT on April 10 (5:07 p.m. PDT) — the same instant as 00:07 UTC on April 11. Sources that give April 10 and April 11 are describing one moment in two time zones.^[4]

It was the first crewed lunar flight in more than 50 years, since the Apollo era ended in 1972.^[1]

The four crew members were Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), and Christina Koch (mission specialist) of NASA, and Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist) of the Canadian Space Agency — the first non-American to fly to the Moon's vicinity.^[3]

NASA reported the flyby on April 6, with the spacecraft passing about 4,067 miles above the far side of the Moon. Two minutes later it reached its farthest point from Earth, about 252,756 miles, passing Apollo 13's 248,655-mile mark and setting a record for human spaceflight.^[5][6]

NASA publishes Artemis distances in miles only. Figures circulating in kilometres — 406,771 km for the distance record, 6,545 km for the lunar flyby — are conversions rather than published values, and the flyby conversion is off by about a kilometre from the 4,067-mile figure NASA actually gave.^[5][6]

There is also a pre-flight and post-flight version of the total distance. Before the mission NASA said the crew was «expected to travel a total of 695,081 miles»; the post-flight assessment published April 20 describes the completed 694,481-mile journey. The second number is the measured one.^[7]

Mission duration is a third case. NASA's own wording is descriptive — a «nearly 10-day journey» — and the frequently quoted 9 days, 1 hour and 32 minutes is arithmetic from launch to splashdown rather than a figure NASA published.^[4][7]

The obvious next question after Artemis II is when astronauts land, and the answer changed after this flight. NASA said in June 2026 that Artemis III «will undertake a series of challenging tests in Earth orbit in 2027» — rendezvous and docking demonstrations with lander hardware, not a lunar landing.^[8]

The first crewed landing at the lunar south pole moved to Artemis IV. This matters when reading older coverage: material written before mid-2026 describes Artemis III as a 2026 landing mission, a plan that no longer stands. NASA named Randy Bresnik as commander and ESA's Luca Parmitano as pilot for the reshaped mission.^[8]

Every figure on this page comes from NASA. For a NASA mission there is no second independent observer of launch time, crew assignments, trajectory distances or splashdown coordinates — the agency that flew the mission is the only body that measures them. The statements here are therefore attributed to NASA rather than presented as independently cross-checked facts.^[1][4]