Artemis II Is Launching Today — Four Astronauts Are About to Go Closer to the Moon Than Any Human in 54 Years

NASA's Artemis II mission launches April 1 with four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon. Here is everything you need to know about the most important space mission in a generation.

The countdown began at Kennedy Space Center before dawn on April 1, 2026, with a precision and calm that belies the extraordinary nature of what is happening: for the first time since Eugene Cernan stepped off the lunar surface in December 1972 — more than fifty years ago — human beings are going to travel to the vicinity of the moon.

Artemis II is not a landing mission. Its four crew members — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch of NASA, plus Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — will travel around the moon on a trajectory that takes them approximately 10,000 kilometres beyond its far side, the furthest distance from Earth that any humans have ever reached. The mission is designed to test the Orion spacecraft's systems with crew aboard, validate the life support and navigation systems that will be required for the subsequent Artemis III landing mission, and demonstrate that the Space Launch System can reliably carry humans beyond low Earth orbit.

The rescue team that CBS News profiled — a global network of Air Force rescuers on standby across multiple ocean and land recovery zones — represents the operational safety architecture behind what is publicly presented as a mission of exploration. Recovery contingencies are planned for scenarios that mission planners describe as extraordinarily unlikely while being professionally obligated to prepare for.

For the four astronauts, the mission's emotional weight is visible in their public communications. Christina Koch, whose previous record for longest female spaceflight demonstrated the kind of resilience that makes long-duration mission selection decisions, described the moon journey as 'the thing I will tell grandchildren about.' Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut to travel to the moon's vicinity, spoke in terms that acknowledge the historical dimension without making it the mission's primary identity.

The launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. Eastern time on April 1. If successful, humans will be in lunar vicinity for the first time since 1972 within 72 hours of launch — a milestone that the current generation of space scientists and engineers has been working toward for their entire professional lives.