If all goes according to NASA’s plans, 2026 will finally be the year astronauts once again set off for the moon.
Within months, four astronauts are preparing to fly around the moon on a nearly 10-day mission, the closest humans have come in more than half a century.
The flight, known as Artemis II, could lift off as early as February and would mark a long-awaited jump start for America’s delayed lunar return program. The mission will be a critical test for NASA’s next generation Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for more than a decade and have faced years of setbacks and severe budget overruns. The system had never carried a crew before.
Returning to the moon has been a priority for President Donald Trump since his first term, and the current administration has once again focused on controlling the heated space race between the United States and China. Chinese officials have pledged to land Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030.
Geopolitical implications aside, the Artemis 2 mission is designed to usher in a new era of space exploration, with the aim of establishing long-term bases on the Moon before astronauts one day venture to Mars.
“Within the next three years, we will once again land American astronauts on the moon, but this time with the infrastructure needed to survive,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator, told NBC News in an interview last week after he was sworn in.
For some scientists, the excitement about returning to the Moon stems from the prospect of investigating enduring mysteries about the Moon’s formation and evolution — such as violent collisions in the nascent solar system that created it and where its water originated — that came into focus during the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.
“As you can imagine, lunar scientists have had a lot of pent-up questions for decades,” says Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Answering some of these questions could shed light on similar processes that occurred during the formation of our planet, according to Denevi.
“The Earth is kind of a terrible record-keeper,” she said. “With plate tectonics, weather — these things have completely erased their early history. But on the Moon, you have this terrain that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s right there on the surface so we can explore it.”
Although the Artemis 2 mission will not land on the moon, it will test different technologies. Docking maneuvers and life support systems – first in Earth orbit and then in lunar orbit – will be essential for future missions.
NASA previously launched the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule on an unmanned test flight around the moon — the Artemis I mission — for three and a half weeks in 2022.