Something truly remarkable is about to happen, and it has been more than 50 years in the making. NASA is preparing to send four astronauts on a journey around the Moon for the first time since 1972, and the launch could happen as early as the first week of March. The mission, called Artemis II, will carry the crew on a 10-day voyage that takes them sweeping around the far side of the Moon and safely back to Earth, a side of the Moon that no one on the ground ever gets to see. The last time any human being traveled to the Moon was during the legendary Apollo 17 mission, meaning that for more than half a century, our closest neighbor in space has simply been waiting, quietly and patiently, for us to find our way back.
The four crew members are three Americans, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who will make history as the first Canadian ever to travel to the Moon. The team will ride aboard NASA’s enormous Space Launch System rocket and spend their 10 days living inside the Orion capsule, a spacecraft roughly the size of a minibus, where they will eat, sleep, and work side by side as they travel farther from Earth than any human beings have ever gone before. That staggering distance record alone makes this one of the most breathtaking moments in the history of space exploration, and millions of people around the world are already counting down the days with barely contained excitement. If Artemis II succeeds, it opens the door to Artemis III, the mission that aims to actually land astronauts back on the lunar surface and bring to life a dream that the whole world has been holding onto for over 50 remarkable years.