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.
At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's SLS waits on Launch Pad 39B.
Apollo 10, the three Skylab crews and 53 shuttle flights all left from here.
A NASA mission, with the Canadian and European space agencies.
The Artemis program's goal: return humans to the Moon, and this time stay.
Artemis I flew without a crew in 2022. Artemis II carries the first one.
It is a test flight: to check that Orion keeps a crew alive far from Earth.
They will loop around the Moon and come back, without landing.
At its top, Lockheed Martin's Orion capsule, which the crew named Integrity.
Aboard, four astronauts: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.
SLS stands 98 meters tall: a little shorter than Apollo's 111-meter Saturn V.
Boeing built its core stage, Northrop Grumman its two solid rocket boosters.
Estimated cost of each SLS and Orion launch: about 4 billion dollars.
Liftoff! Four RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters lift 2,600 tonnes.
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 ULA's upper stage, a single RL10 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.
Past the high point, at 70,000 km, Orion falls back toward Earth without firing anything.
It speeds up all the way: from 3,300 km/h at the top to 37,000 km/h at the bottom.
Apollo 11 left from a low orbit: its third stage added 11,000 km/h in one go.
Orion does not carry enough propellant for a push like that.
So the upper stage stretched the orbit, and the fall toward Earth does the rest.
At the lowest point, where it moves fastest, only about 1,400 km/h is missing.
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": with no big burn, the Moon will send it back to Earth.
Seventeen seconds on the thrusters: a touch-up, to meet the Moon at the right spot.
Two corrections planned before this one were cancelled: the path was already right.
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 Earth.
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.
Four days back to Earth, without relighting the main engine.
Orion leaves the Moon's sphere of influence: Earth takes over again.
"Earth is pulling us back, and we are happy about that," says Wiseman.
Fifteen seconds on the thrusters: the first of three small trajectory corrections.
Each tries on a compression garment, against dizziness on returning to gravity.
An oxygen pressurization issue cancels a manual piloting test.
Orion speeds up as Earth pulls it in: it rushes toward it faster and faster.
The crew stows the cabin and reinstalls the seats for entry.
On Artemis I, in 2022, the heat shield had shed chunks during entry.
Rather than replace it, NASA changed the entry trajectory to spare it.
Last correction, five hours before splashdown.
The astronauts put on their orange suits for entry.
The service module separates: it will burn up in the atmosphere over the Pacific.
Only the capsule remains, heat shield facing forward.
Entry interface, at 122 km: Orion hits the atmosphere at nearly 40,000 km/h.
The plasma cuts the radio for six minutes. The shield heats to nearly 1,650 °C.
The astronauts endure up to nearly 4 G.
The forward cover pops off: eleven parachutes will open, one after another.
At 7 km up, two drogue parachutes steady Orion and slow it down.
At 1.6 km, three small parachutes pull out the three mains, 35 meters each.
Under their canopies, Orion comes down no faster than a car in town.
Splashdown in the Pacific, off San Diego, after nine days of flight.
In all, Orion has traveled more than 1.1 million kilometers.
Less than two hours later, helicopters fly them to the USS John P. Murtha.
Mission accomplished: Orion has brought a crew back from the Moon. Next step, landing.