NASA is sending astronauts back to the moon in 2026
NASA prepares to finally send back the Artemis II crew, the first crewed expedition to the Moon since the end of the Apollo missions in 1972.
After several rounds of testing and minor delays, the team is now preparing to transport its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft to the Kennedy Space Center. NASA says it is preparing for a possible dress rehearsal in late January and a launch as early as Feb. 6, the agency wrote in a Jan. 9 blog post. “This is another step toward new U.S.-crewed missions to the surface of the Moon, leading to a sustained presence on the Moon that will help the agency prepare to send the first astronauts – Americans – to Mars,” NASA said.
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The Artemis II mission was originally planned for November 2024, with astronaut Reid Wiseman named commander of a 4-person crew aboard the agency’s newest space vehicle. The planned date, however, was pushed back to April 2026 and now seems to be accelerating for an even earlier takeoff in 2026.
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Team members include Wiseman, NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The crew will test the ship’s life support systems over a 10-day period and travel more than 4,000 miles to the far side of the Moon.
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The mission, if successful, could bring the U.S. space agency closer to victory in the modern space race, a decades-long effort to return astronauts to the lunar surface and prepare the space body for new scientific discoveries, strip mining and potential interplanetary existence. The United States faces the Chinese National Space Administration, which has flown several uncrewed missions to the Moon and is aiming for a human landing in 2030, and the Indian Space Research Organization, which became the first agency to send a lunar lander to the space rock’s South Pole. Private sector efforts, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have also advanced missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond.
