A woman and three men around the Moon in 2024

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There first woman and three men will return to fly around the Moon after the last Apollo mission in 1972: they are the Americans Christina Koch, Victor Glover And Reid Wisemanalong with the Canadian Jeremy Hansen. They will do so aboard the Artemis II mission, the first manned mission of the Artemis lunar program, scheduled for late 2024. Over 10 days, the crew will fly to the far side of the Moon, going farther from Earth than expected. never made a human being. NASA’s number one announces it, Bill Nelsonat an event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Artemis II will mark the debut of manned flight in a post-Apollo program aimed at returning astronauts to the lunar surface this decade and establishing a sustainable outpost on our moon, creating a springboard for human exploration of Mars.
The newly introduced crew will include the first Canadian astronaut for a lunar mission, as well as three Americans from a pool of 18 astronauts from the NASA – nine women and nine men – selected for the Artemis program in 2020.

Artemis I in flight last December

The initial Artemis I mission was successfully completed in December 2022, concluding the maiden launch of NASA’s powerful next-generation mega-rocket and its spacecraft Orion newly built, on a 25-day unmanned test flight.

The goal of the Artemis II flight, a journey that will last 10 days and will travel 2.3 million kilometers around the Moon and back, is to demonstrate that all of Orion’s life support and all other systems are functioning as intended, with astronauts aboard in deep space. Artemis II will venture to approx 10,300 km past the far side of the Moon before returning, marking the closest pass humans have made to Earth’s natural satellite since Apollo 17, which brought Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on the surface of the lunar satellite in December 1972. Cernan and Schmitt were the last of 12 NASA astronauts to walk on the moon during six Apollo missions since 1969, starting with Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.

370 thousand km away from the Earth

At its furthest distance from Earth, Artemis II should reach a point at more than 370,000km away from our planet. For comparison, the International Space Station, in low orbit, flies at an altitude of approx 420km.