Artemis 2 has come home, but NASA still has its nose to the lunar grindstone.
The four astronauts of Artemis 2, the first crewed mission to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, splashed down safely off the coast of San Diego last night (April 10).
It was a big moment for NASA, but the agency doesn’t plan to rest on its laurels. The agency has even more ambitious plans in the years ahead — including putting boots down on the moon just a couple of years from now.
Artemis 2 launched on April 1, sending four astronauts — NASA’s Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency — on a 10-day trip around the moon.
It was the first crewed mission of the Artemis program and the second overall, after Artemis 1, which launched an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back to Earth in late 2022.
The next mission, Artemis 3, was originally supposed to be a crewed trip to the lunar surface. But in late February, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a big change to the Artemis architecture. Artemis 3 will now stay in Earth orbit, testing Orion’s ability to dock with one or both of the program’s crewed lunar landers — SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon.
NASA wants to launch that mission in mid-2027. If all goes well, Artemis 4 will then put astronauts down near the moon’s south pole, using Orion and one of the privately developed Human Landing System (HLS) vehicles, in late 2028.
Things will only get more exciting from there. The crewed Artemis missions will keep coming, helping to establish a lunar base by 2032. Astronauts will live and work at this outpost for a long time after that, teaching NASA the skills and techniques it needs to make the next giant leap — to Mars.
