In 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface ' a momentous engineering and science feat marked by his iconic words, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Three years later, Apollo 17 became NASA's final Apollo mission to land humans on the brightest and largest object in our night sky. Since then, no humans have visited the moon or traveled past low Earth orbit (LEO), largely because of shifting politics, funding, and priorities. But that is about to change. Through NASA's Artemis II mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than September 2025, four astronauts will be the first humans to travel to the moon in more than 50 years. In 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission proved the ability of NASA's new spacecraft Orion ' launched on the new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System ' to travel farther into space than ever before and return safely to Earth. Building on that success, the 10-day Artemis II mission will pave the way...
learn more
