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.”
Although the Artemis 2 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.
