More than half a century after Apollo programme carried out its final crewed journey to the Moon, four astronauts are preparing for a landmark mission expected to open a new chapter in American space exploration.
NASA’s long-delayed Artemis II is scheduled to lift off from Florida as early as April 1, heading towards Earth’s natural satellite.
The mission will not attempt a landing. Instead, it will perform a lunar flyby similar to Apollo 8, which first carried humans around the Moon in 1968.
The crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — will undertake the roughly 10-day journey.
The mission is set to mark several historic firsts, including the first time a woman, a person of colour and a non-American will travel on a lunar mission.
It will also be the first crewed flight of NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, a massive orange-and-white launch vehicle designed to enable repeated lunar missions.
The programme aims to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, paving the way for future journeys beyond.
“We’re going back to the Moon because it’s the next step in our journey to Mars,” said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, on a NASA podcast.
Renewed race, new realities
The Artemis program — named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology — aims to develop technologies needed for eventual human missions to Mars, a far more distant and complex destination.
This ambition comes amid growing geopolitical pressure, as China targets a crewed Moon landing by 2030. Beijing has also set its sights on the lunar south pole, believed to hold valuable natural resources.
While the situation invites comparisons with the Cold War-era Space Race, experts suggest the dynamics differ significantly.
“The Chinese are “not really competing with anyone but themselves,”” said Matthew Hersch, noting that the original rivalry was “unique” and unlikely to be repeated soon.
Despite lower levels of investment compared to the 1960s, technological advances have transformed modern spaceflight.
“The computer technology that supports the Artemis 2 crew would be almost unimaginable to the Apollo 8 crew, which went to the Moon in a spacecraft with the electronics of a modern high-end toaster oven,” Hersch added.
Risks and preparations
NASA has acknowledged that the mission carries inherent risks. The crew will travel aboard a spacecraft that has never before carried humans or journeyed to the Moon, located more than 384,000 kilometres from Earth — roughly 1,000 times farther than the International Space Station.
“We don’t accept anything less than perfect, otherwise we’re accepting greater risk,” said Peggy Whitson.
“That is an important process that everyone has to embrace in order for us to be really successful, because we have to live with that knowledge, because of our space flight history, that when accidents happen, people will die,” she added.
To minimise risks, the astronauts will conduct a series of system checks and manoeuvres in Earth’s vicinity before committing to the lunar trajectory.
Ambitious timeline under scrutiny
The mission’s primary goal is to verify the performance of both the rocket and spacecraft, laying the groundwork for a planned Moon landing in 2028 — the final year of Donald Trump’s term.
However, experts have raised concerns about the ambitious timeline, particularly as NASA depends on private-sector partners. Competing lunar landers are currently under development by companies led by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
The Artemis programme has also faced delays and significant cost overruns.
Still, NASA hopes Artemis II will rekindle the sense of unity and inspiration generated by Apollo 8. In 1968, at the height of global turmoil, around one billion people watched the mission as astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon.
Their mission produced the iconic “Earthrise” image and was widely credited with having “saved 1968.”
Nearly six decades on, amid renewed divisions and uncertainty, the Artemis II crew now prepares to inspire the world once again.
