If all goes according to NASA’s plans, 2026 will finally be the year that astronauts once again launch to the moon.
In a matter of months, four astronauts are poised to fly around the moon on a roughly 10-day mission — the closest humans will have gotten in more than half a century.
The flight, known as Artemis II, could lift off as early as February and would be a long-awaited jump start to America’s lagging return-to-the-moon program. The mission will serve as a crucial test of NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for more than a decade and faced years of setbacks and severe 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 renewed emphasis on dominating the intensifying space race between the U.S. and China. Chinese officials have pledged to land 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 goal of eventually establishing bases for long-duration stays on the moon before astronauts someday venture on to Mars.
“Within the next three years, we are going to land American astronauts again on the moon, but this time with the infrastructure to stay,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator, told NBC News in an interview last week after he was sworn in.
For some scientists, the excitement around returning to the moon stems from the prospect of investigating enduring mysteries about the moon’s formation and evolution — such as violent collisions in the nascent solar system that created it and where its water originated — which 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.
Answering some of those questions could shed light on similar processes that occurred during our planet’s formation, according to Denevi.
“Earth is kind of a terrible record-keeper,” she said. “With plate tectonics, weather — these things have just totally erased its very earliest history. But on the moon, you have this terrain that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s just sitting there on the surface for us to explore.”
Although the Artemis II mission won’t 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.