Artemis II: The Complete Mission in Real-Time 3D
April 6, 2026
Experience the Artemis II mission of April 6, 2026: follow the spacecraft's real Earth-to-Moon trajectory and back, in a real-time 3D reconstruction.
It's April 1, 2026.
On Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center stands SLS, NASA's Moon rocket.
At its top sits the Orion capsule, which the crew named Integrity.
Aboard, four astronauts: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.
Artemis II: they will loop around the Moon and come back, without landing.
It is a test flight: to check that Orion keeps a crew alive far from Earth.
Four RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters tear the 98-meter SLS off the ground.
Nearly 39 meganewtons of thrust: more than Apollo's Saturn V.
The two solid rocket boosters provide more than three quarters of that thrust.
Three of the four RS-25s have flown before: they are Space Shuttle engines.
Nobody is flying it: the rocket's computers steer, and the crew watches.
After 2 minutes, the empty boosters drop away and fall into the Atlantic.
The panels shielding the service module are jettisoned, then the launch escape tower.
That tower would have pulled the capsule off the rocket in an accident.
After 8 minutes, the RS-25s shut down and the empty core stage drops away.
These shuttle engines will never fly again: they go down with the core stage.
What remains is the upper stage, with a single engine, and Orion on top.
Orion unfolds its four solar arrays: 19 meters from tip to tip.
Orion is two modules: the crew capsule and the service module.
The service module, built in Europe, supplies electricity, water, oxygen and propulsion.
The upper stage fires its engine and raises the orbit's low point.
The low point rises to 185 km, clear of the atmosphere.
The upper stage fires again: the orbit stretches out to an altitude of more than 70,000 km.
A single lap of this orbit takes almost a day.
A little earlier, a warning light came on at the toilet. Houston helps fix it.
Orion separates from the upper stage: from now on, it flies alone.
For almost a day, the crew checks out Orion in this high orbit.
"Can it scrub our CO₂? Can we drink water? Can we go to the bathroom?" Wiseman sums up.
As long as it circles Earth, the crew can still get home fast.
Trans-lunar injection: Orion's engine fires for almost six minutes.
This engine has flown before: it was on Space Shuttle Atlantis from 2000 to 2002.
For the first time since 1972, humans are leaving Earth orbit.
Four days of travel to the Moon, nearly 400,000 kilometers away.
The commander, Reid Wiseman, a Navy test pilot, once led NASA's astronaut corps.
The pilot, Victor Glover, is the first Black astronaut to head for the Moon.
Christina Koch is the first woman to head for the Moon.
An engineer, she holds the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman: 328 days.
Canada's Jeremy Hansen is the first non-American to head for the Moon.
A fighter pilot, he is on his very first spaceflight.
Living space: 9 m³ for four, a little more than Apollo's 6 m³ for three.
To keep their muscles, they work out on a flywheel exercise device.
The wastewater vent line clogs: the crew falls back on backup collection bags.
Orion is also testing a laser link to send video and data to Earth.
Orion slows down all the way: Earth holds it back, until the Moon pulls it in.
It is a "free return": without firing anything, the Moon will send it back to Earth.
Even if the engine failed, the crew would still come home.
Orion is about to pass behind the Moon, over the side we never see from here.
At 400,171 km from Earth, they break Apollo 13's distance record, which stood since 1970.
During the flyby, the crew will take more than 7,000 photos.
For the first time, humans see the whole Orientale basin, 900 km across.
Earth sets behind the Moon: 40 minutes without radio contact.
Alone behind the Moon, like the Apollo crews before them.
At their closest, they pass 6,545 km above the far side.
They are nearly 407,000 km from Earth: no humans have ever been so far.
Earth rises from behind the Moon, and the radio comes back.
From Orion, the Moon hides the Sun: an eclipse lasting almost an hour.
They photograph the Sun's corona, invisible the rest of the time.
They also see six flashes: meteoroids striking the Moon.
The crew proposes naming a crater Integrity, after their capsule.
And another Carroll, after Reid Wiseman's late wife.
Homeward bound, coasting back across roughly 400,000 kilometers to Earth.
Orion jettisons its service module and turns the crew module heat-shield-forward for the plunge back through the atmosphere.
Entry interface: the capsule hits the atmosphere at nearly 40,000 km/h, wrapped in a sheath of plasma hotter than the Sun's surface.
Through the heat and the deceleration, eleven parachutes deploy in sequence to slow Orion for a gentle ocean landing.
Orion splashes down in the Pacific off California, closing the first crewed lunar mission of the Artemis era.