Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026, and splashed down on April 10 after a nine-day, one-hour and 32-minute flight around the Moon. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen travelled 252,756 miles from Earth, the farthest humans have ever travelled from home, beating the Apollo 13 record on April 6.

The mission was a flyby, not a landing. Its job was to prove the Orion spacecraft, the Space Launch System rocket and the life-support systems with a crew aboard, and it did. The crew named their Orion capsule Integrity, and NASA has since released the preliminary lunar science report, Artemis II: Sights and Sounds of Science, built from the crew's photographs and observations.

The flight was not without drama. About a day after launch, just fifteen minutes before the trans-lunar injection burn, the crew received a cabin leak warning. The warning was ruled a false alarm, the burn went ahead, and Orion fired its main engine for five minutes and fifty seconds to send the crew toward the Moon.

All four astronauts have now stepped away from active spaceflight. Wiseman and Glover moved to emeritus status in September 2026, Koch became NASA's acting deputy chief engineer on November 1, and Hansen retired from the Canadian Space Agency. Their next careers are in leadership, teaching and management, not in orbit.

Artemis III, now expected in late 2027, has been reshaped. Instead of a landing, it is planned as an Orion test mission in Earth orbit, practising docking with one or both of the planned lunar landers, Blue Origin's Blue Moon and SpaceX's Starship. A crewed landing is now aimed at Artemis IV in 2028, and NASA shelved the Lunar Gateway station in March 2026. The moon programme is still moving, but the path to boots on the surface runs through docking practice first.