Is it true that Artemis 2 went to the Moon?

Artemis II launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, 2026 at 6:35 p.m. Eastern time, with four people aboard: Reid Wiseman as commander, Victor Glover as pilot and Christina Koch as mission specialist, all three from NASA, together with Canadian Jeremy Hansen, from the Canadian Space Agency. After nearly ten days of flight, the Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific off the coast of San Diego on April 10, at 5:07 p.m. Pacific time.

The trajectory took the spacecraft to 4,067 miles above the lunar surface at closest approach and then out to 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the distance record that Apollo 13 had held since 1970. The total length of the trip was 695,081 miles. During the flyby on April 6 the crew took more than 7,000 images of the surface, including the topography of the lunar south pole region where a later mission is planned to land.

Artemis II was a crewed test flight. The central objective was to verify that Orion's life support systems can keep people alive in deep space, something no spacecraft had demonstrated since the end of the Apollo program. The crew carried out manual piloting demonstrations, rehearsed emergency procedures, tested the suits, exercised, and ran scientific investigations, including the AVATAR study on how tissue responds to microgravity and deep-space radiation. The trip's figures — maximum distance, duration, lunar approach — are a consequence of that test trajectory, not the point of the mission itself.