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Four Astronauts Await Liftoff on Humanity's First Flight to the Moon in Half a Century

On Wednesday, April 1, 2026, NASA is set to launch the Artemis II mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen aboard the 322-foot Space Launch System rocket.
Ending a 53-year gap, the mission marks NASA's first crewed moonshot since Apollo 17 in 1972, representing the agency's return to human lunar exploration after five decades of absence from Earth's orbit.
Ground crews began filling the rocket's core stage with 733,000 gallons of super-cooled propellant on Wednesday morning to power the four RS-25 engines, with launch managers reporting an 80 percent chance of favorable weather for the 6:24 p.m. EDT liftoff.
Setting a new distance record, the spacecraft will travel around 4,700 miles beyond the far side of the Moon, with the launch potentially visible up the East Coast under clear conditions, according to The New York Times.
The mission represents a critical step in NASA's multibillion-dollar Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2028 before China reaches the Moon around 2030.

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