NASA Launches Humans to the Moon
- Aniket Tank
- Apr 2
- 2 min read
Aniket Tank, editor-in-chief
NASA’s Artemis II mission was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Space port on April 1st at 6:35 p.m. carrying Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen. The four astronauts, aboard the Orion space craft, will fly around the moon and back, becoming the first humans to do so since the 1970s.
Artemis II will take the four astronauts on a ten-day mission to fly by the Moon. The nearly six-million-pound rocket will propel the astronauts on a flyby of the moon, where they will be within 6,000 miles of the lunar surface. When they re-enter the atmosphere, the astronauts will be going 25,000 MPH and they will be the fastest traveling humans in history.
The Space Launch System (SLS) is the rocket that will get the astronauts inside the Orion Spacecraft into space. From orbit, Orion will fire its engines and propel itself to the moon.
SLS is a rocket developed by NASA to return humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars. The project was started after the end of the Space Shuttle Program in 2012 and has taken off once before in the 2022 unmanned Artemis I mission. Much of the technology from the Space Shuttle has been repurposed for SLS. The main engines and side boosters of SLS are improvements made to the engines and boosters on the Space Shuttle.
Atop SLS is the Orpion Spacecraft where the astronauts will live and work during their 10-day mission. Orion developed by NASA with Lockheed Martin and Airbus is a partially reuseable capsule the size of a small camper van.
Artemis II is a stepping stone to larger accomplishments NASA is aiming for with the Artemis program. The goal has always been to return humans to not just a flyby of the Moon but a landing on the moon. After Artemis II with Artemis III, NASA hopes to test Orion with lunar landers made by SpaceX and/or Blue Origin. Originally Artemis III was meant to be the mission that landed humans on the Moon but in early 2026 they decided to restructure the mission. Artemis III is targeted to launch in 2027 but will likely be delayed. NASA’s current goal is to have Americans back on the moon by 2028, which will also likely be delayed.
