It's go time: Historic Moon mission set for lift-off Estelle.Bronkhorst Wed, 03/25/2026 - 12:00
WASHINGTON - More than half-a-century after the groundbreaking Apollo program's last crewed flight to the Moon, three men and one woman are preparing for a lunar journey set to turn a new page in American space exploration. The long-delayed NASA mission dubbed Artemis II is slated to lift-off from Florida and venture to Earth's natural satellite as early as April 1. They won't land but are instead on a mission to fly by, much as Apollo 8 did in 1968. Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glober and Christina Koch -- along with Canadian Jeremy Hansen -- will carry out the approximately 10-day trip. The odyssey will mark a series of firsts: the first time a woman, a person of color and a non-American will venture on a Moon mission. It's also the inaugural crewed flight of NASA's new lunar rocket, dubbed SLS. The mammoth orange-and-white rocket is designed to allow the United States to repeatedly return to the Moon in years to come, with the goal of establishing a permanent base that will offer a stepping stone for further exploration. "We're going back to the Moon because it's the next step in our journey to Mars," said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, on a NASA podcast. The Artemis programme -- named in honour of Apollo's goddess twin -- aims to test technologies needed to one day send humans to Mars, a far more distant journey. The crew will board a spacecraft that has never once carried humans or travelled to the Moon, which is more than 384,000 kilometres from Earth -- or roughly 1,000 times further away than the International Space Station. "We don't accept anything less than perfect, otherwise we're accepting greater risk," NASA's former chief astronaut Peggy Whitson told AFP. "That is an important process that everyone has to embrace in order for us to be really successful, because we have to live with that knowledge, because of our space flight history, that when accidents happen, people will die," she said. Minimising risks and preventing disaster will involve the crew performing a series of checks and manoeuvres while still in Earth's vicinity. If all goes well, they'll set forth for the Moon.
