NASA preparing for its first crewed Moon mission in 50 years

NASA is getting ready to finally send off the crew of the Artemis II, the first crewed expedition to the Moon since the Apollo missions ended in 1972.

Following several test rounds and small delays, the team is now readying to transport its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft to the Kennedy Space Center. NASA says it's preparing for a potential wet dress rehearsal at the end of January and a launch as early as Feb. 6, the agency wrote in a Jan. 9 blog post. "It is another step toward new U.S.-crewed missions to the Moon’s surface, leading to a sustained presence on the Moon that will help the agency prepare to send the first astronauts — Americans — to Mars," said NASA.

The Artemis II mission was originally slated for Nov. 2024, with astronaut Reid Wiseman appointed as commander of a 4-person crew aboard the agency's brand new space vehicle. The scheduled date was pushed back to April 2026, however, and now appears to be ramping up for an even earlier 2026 blast off.

Members of the team include NASA’s Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. The crew will be testing the ship's life support systems over a 10-day period and travel more than 4,000 miles to the far side of the moon.

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The mission, if successful, may push the U.S. space agency closer toward winning the modern space race, a decades-long effort to get astronauts back on the lunar surface and prime the space body for further scientific discovery, surface mining, and a potential interplanetary existence. The U.S. is up against China's National Space Administration, which has landed multiple crew-less missions on the moon and is shooting for a human touchdown in 2030, and India's Space Research Organization, which became the first agency to get a moon lander to the space rock's south pole. Private sector efforts, including Elon Musk's SpaceX, have also advanced missions toward the Moon, Mars, and beyond.