NASA launches four astronauts on lunar mission in half a century

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, April 1,2026: Four astronauts blasted off from Florida on Wednesday on NASA’s Artemis II mission, a high-stakes voyage around the moon that marks the United ​States’ boldest step yet toward returning humans to the lunar surface later this decade in a race with China.
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, topped with its Orion crew capsule, roared to ‌life just before sunset at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying its debut crew – three U.S. astronauts and a Canadian astronaut – into Earth orbit. The 32-story-tall space vehicle thundered into clear skies trailing a towering column of thick, white vapor.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the launch was an opening act for subsequent missions that would include construction of a moon base to support the “enduring presence we’re trying to create on the surface.”
If the mission proceeds as planned, the crew consisting of ​NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will fly around the moon and back in their nearly 10-day expedition, putting the spacecraft through its paces ​while venturing deeper into space than humans have ever gone.
The mission is the debut crewed test flight in the Artemis program, successor to NASA’s Cold War-era Apollo ⁠project, and the world’s first to send astronauts in the vicinity of the moon, out of Earth’s orbit, in 53 years.
It serves as a crucial dress rehearsal for a NASA bid to land humans on ​the lunar surface later this decade, after one more crewed mission around the moon. NASA is targeting 2028 for Artemis IV, a first-ever landing of astronauts on the moon’s South Pole, seeking to beat China’s planned crewed ​mission to the same lunar region as early as 2030.
The last time astronauts walked on the moon – a feat so far achieved only by the United States – was the final Apollo mission in 1972.
‘FOR ALL HUMANITY’
After nearly three years of training, the crew is the first to fly in NASA’s Artemis program, a multibillion-dollar venture established in 2017 to build up a long-term U.S. presence on the moon over the next decade and beyond, serving as a stepping stone to eventual missions to Mars.
Minutes ​before liftoff, Canadian astronaut Hansen, strapped inside the gumdrop-shaped Orion capsule, told mission control in Houston: “This is Jeremy, we are going for all humanity.”