Artemis II launched into space on Wednesday hours after President Trump pledged to send U.S. astronauts to the moon more than five decades after the Apollo missions.
The Artemis II mission will be sending four astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to circle around the moon before heading back home. Video of the launch was shared across social media on Thursday.
Hours prior, the president said on Truth Social that astronauts will be going “farther into Deep Space than any human has EVER gone.”
“Tonight at 6:24 P.M. EST, for the first time in over 50 YEARS, America is going back to the Moon!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Artemis II, among the most powerful rockets ever built, is launching our Brave Astronauts farther into Deep Space than any human has EVER gone.”
President Trump established the Artemis program during his first term in 2017. According to Fox News, Artemis II had been scheduled for “an earlier launch but faced delays following technical issues identified during testing, including fuel and helium leaks that required additional repairs to the Space Launch System rocket.”
The four astronauts assigned to Artemis II — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of the U.S., and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are expected to travel around the moon and back, marking the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972.
While the mission will not land on the lunar surface, it is designed to carry astronauts farther from Earth than any crewed mission since the Apollo era.
NASA has said the Artemis mission represents just one small step in the long journey toward eventually putting a human on Mars.
“Under Artemis, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly difficult missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build on our foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars,” says the NASA website.
The Artemis III mission has been scheduled to launch in 2027 for a low Earth orbit that will “test one or both commercial landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin, respectively,” per NASA. The scheduled Artemis IV mission in 2028 will be the first lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.
