2026 will be the year NASA astronauts fly around the moon again — if all goes to plan

If everything goes as planned by NASA, 2026 will finally be the year when astronauts launch to the Moon again.

In a few months, four astronauts are set to fly around the Moon on a roughly 10-day mission — the closest humans have gotten in more than half a century.

The flight, known as Artemis II, could take off as early as February and would be a long-awaited boost to America’s lagging return to the Moon program. The mission will serve as a crucial test for NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for more than a decade and have faced years of setbacks and serious budget overruns. The system has never carried a crew before.

Returning to the Moon has been a priority for President Donald Trump since his first term, and the current administration has placed a renewed emphasis on dominating the intensifying space race between the United States and China. Chinese authorities have committed to landing their own astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030.

Beyond the geopolitical implications, the Artemis II mission is designed to usher in a new era of space exploration, with the aim of eventually establishing bases for long-term stays on the Moon before astronauts one day venture to Mars.

“Over the next three years, we’re going to land American astronauts on the Moon again, but this time with the infrastructure to stay there,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator, told NBC News in an interview last week after he was sworn in.

For some scientists, excitement about returning to the Moon comes from the prospect of investigating enduring mysteries about the Moon’s formation and evolution — such as the violent collisions in the nascent solar system that created it and the origin of its water — that were brought to light during the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.

“As you can imagine, lunar scientists have been asking many questions for decades,” said Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

According to Denevi, answering some of these questions could shed light on similar processes that occurred during the formation of our planet.

“The Earth is kind of a terrible record keeper,” she said. “With plate tectonics, weather, those things have totally erased its very early history. But on the Moon, you have this terrain that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s just sitting on the surface for us to explore.”

Although the Artemis II mission will not land on the lunar surface, it will test various technologies, docking maneuvers and life support systems – first in Earth orbit and then in orbit around the Moon – that will be essential for future missions.

NASA previously launched the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule on an uncrewed test flight around the moon – the Artemis I mission – for 3 1/2 weeks in 2022.

The space agency had hoped to launch Artemis II in 2024, but costly delays have repeatedly pushed it and subsequent missions back.

“There are a lot of things that hang on this, both good and bad,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration. “Everything seems to be falling into place, but this is the first time humans have been on this rocket, and we’ve never tested this life support system in space before.”

No launch date has been announced, but it is expected between February and April. The crew on board will include NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The quartet was selected for the mission in 2023. Wiseman, Glover and Koch will make their second trip to space, while Hansen will make his space debut.

Last weekend, the astronauts completed a key rehearsal on launch day, which involved donning their flight suits, boarding the Orion spacecraft and running through the countdown sequence to the point just before liftoff.

The Artemis program was created under the first Trump administration in 2019 and salvaged the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule from earlier stalled or canceled projects at NASA. The space agency had been working on a next-generation booster since 2010, a year before retiring the space shuttles. The Orion spacecraft, meanwhile, was originally designed for the Constellation program, created by President George W. Bush to carry out crewed flights to the Moon and Mars.

Last week, Trump doubled down on his Moon return agenda in an executive order directing NASA to prioritize “expanding the human reach and American presence in space” by landing astronauts on the lunar surface by 2028.

“This is the culmination of a nearly 15-year effort,” Dreier said. “Assuming it works, it will be considered a major victory for the administration. But if it doesn’t work, or if something catastrophic happens, everything will really be reset.”

Artemis II is intended to pave the way for the Artemis III mission in 2027, which is expected to land four astronauts near the Moon’s south pole, a region very different from where the Apollo astronauts left their footprints.

While the Apollo moon landings took place in a narrow band around the Moon’s equator, the south polar region is a more difficult place to land because the terrain is riddled with craters. These permanently shadowed basins are thought to harbor abundant water ice, a valuable resource for establishing a long-term presence on the Moon and for future crewed missions deeper into the solar system.

“Apollo gave us the framework to understand the Moon,” Denevi said, “and now we have the foundation to ask different questions.”

Denevi leads the Artemis III flight geology team, a role that involves deciding where crew members will move after they land, what types of field work they will do, and what samples they will collect to take home. She is particularly interested in samples from the Moon’s shadowed craters, which are among the coldest places in the solar system.

“When I started studying the Moon, I thought I would spend my entire career studying historical data,” she said. “Now having the opportunity to help collect new samples that can provide new pieces to this puzzle, instead of trying to rearrange all the old pieces, it’s going to be a huge step forward.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com