If everything goes as planned by NASA, 2026 will finally be the year when astronauts launch 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 humans have gotten 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 boost to America’s lagging return to the Moon program. The mission will serve as a crucial test for NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for more than a decade and have faced years of setbacks and serious 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 a renewed emphasis on dominating the intensifying space race between the United States and China. Chinese authorities have committed to landing 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 aim of eventually establishing bases for long-term stays on the Moon before astronauts one day venture to Mars.
“Over the next three years, we’re going to land American astronauts on the Moon again, but this time with the infrastructure to stay there,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator, told NBC News in an interview last week after he was sworn in.
For some scientists, excitement about returning to the Moon comes from the prospect of investigating enduring mysteries about the Moon’s formation and evolution — such as the violent collisions in the nascent solar system that created it and the origin of its water — that were brought to light during the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.
“As you can imagine, lunar scientists have been asking many questions for decades,” said Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
According to Denevi, answering some of these questions could shed light on similar processes that occurred during the formation of our planet.
“The Earth is kind of a terrible record keeper,” she said. “With plate tectonics, weather, those things have totally erased its very early history. But on the Moon, you have this terrain that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s just sitting on the surface for us to explore.”
Although 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 orbit around the Moon – which 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.
