NASA began a two-day countdown Monday for the Artemis II mission, the first crewed Moon flight in over 50 years, scheduled to launch Wednesday evening from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
The ten-day Artemis II mission will send four astronauts – including the first woman, a person of color, and a non-American – on a journey around the Moon and back. This flight will test NASA’s new SLS rocket and pave the way for future missions aiming to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade.
The Artemis program is a U.S. effort to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon, framed as central to maintaining space leadership. No astronaut has ventured to the Moon since the 1970s, and this mission represents both NASA’s history and its future.