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

If all goes according to NASA's plans, 2026 will finally be the year when astronauts go 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 people have come to it 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 start to America's lagging lunar return program. The mission will serve as a critical test of NASA's next-generation Space Launch System rocket. Orion spacecraft, which had been in development for over a decade and faced years of setbacks and severe budget overruns. The system had 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 renewed its emphasis on dominating the Moon. intensifying space race between the US and China. Chinese officials have promised to land their astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030.

Geopolitical implications aside, the Artemis II mission is intended to usher in a new era of space exploration, with the goal of eventually establishing long-term bases on the Moon before astronauts ever travel to Mars.

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

For some scientists, the excitement about returning to the Moon stems from the prospect of exploring enduring mysteries of the Moon's formation and evolution—such as the violent collisions in the nascent solar system that created it and where its water came from—that came into focus during the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.

“As you can imagine, lunar scientists have had a lot of pent-up questions for decades,” said Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

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

“The earth is a terrible record-breaker,” she said. “Plate tectonics, weather – these things have just completely erased its earliest history. But there is an area on the Moon that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it's just sitting on the surface for us to explore.”

While 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 lunar orbit—that will be needed for future missions.

Previously, NASA launched a Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule on an unmanned test flight around the Moon. Artemis I mission – for 3 and a half weeks in 2022.

The space agency had hoped to launch Artemis 2 in 2024, but costly delays repeatedly pushed him and subsequent missions back.

“There's a lot going on here, both good and bad,” said Casey Dreyer, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration. “Everything seems to be coming together, but this is the first time humans have been on this rocket, and we have never tested this life support system in space before.”

The launch date has not yet been announced, but it is expected to take place between February and April. The crew on board will include NASA astronauts Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The four have been selected for the 2023 mission. Wiseman, Glover and Koch will make their second spaceflight, and Hansen will make his spaceflight debut.

Last weekend the astronauts completed key rehearsal on launch daywhich involved donning flight suits, boarding the Orion spacecraft, and performing a countdown sequence to a point just before takeoff.

The Artemis program was created under the first Trump administration in 2019 and salvaged the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule from previous stopped or canceled NASA projects. The space agency has been working on the next-generation launch vehicle since 2010, a year before it retired the space shuttle. Meanwhile, the Orion spacecraft was originally developed for the Constellation program created by President George W. Bush to conduct manned missions to the Moon and Mars.

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

“This is the culmination of nearly 15 years of effort,” Dreyer said. “If it works, it will be seen as a major victory for the administration. But if it doesn't work or something catastrophic happens, it will really reset everything.”

Artemis 2 is intended to pave the way for the Artemis 3 mission in 2027, which is expected to land four astronauts near Earth. south pole of the moona region very different from where the Apollo astronauts left their footprints.

Taking into account that Apollo Moon Landing occurred in a narrow band around the Moon's equator, the south polar region is a more difficult place to land as the terrain is riddled with craters. These permanently shaded pools it was supposed to contain a lot of water icea valuable resource for establishing a long-term presence on the Moon and for future crewed missions to the deeper solar system.

“Apollo gave us a framework for understanding the moon,” Denevi said, “and now we have a framework to ask different questions.”

Denevi leads the Artemis III flight geologists team. This role involves deciding where crew members will roam after landing, what types of field work they will conduct, and what samples they will collect to bring home. She is particularly interested in samples from the moon's shadowed craters, which are some of the coldest places in the solar system.

“When I first started studying the moon, I thought I would spend my entire career studying historical data,” she said. “To now be able to participate in collecting new specimens that can provide new pieces of this puzzle, rather than trying to rearrange all the old pieces, will be a huge step forward.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com