{"id":165540,"date":"2025-09-24T10:01:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T10:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/165540\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T10:01:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T10:01:09","slug":"artemis-program-on-track-to-take-astronauts-around-the-moon-nasa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/165540\/","title":{"rendered":"Artemis program on track to take astronauts around the Moon: NASA"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA’s first crewed flight in its Artemis program \u2014 a trip around the Moon and back \u2014 is on track for launch in April 2026 and could potentially be moved up to February, the space agency says.<\/p>\n

The flagship US effort to return humans to the Moon, Artemis, is a multi-billion-dollar series of missions that rivals a similar effort by China, which aims for a 2030 astronaut landing.<\/p>\n

Artemis 2, a 10-day flight in which a crew of four astronauts will fly around the Moon and back, is a crucial test flight paving the way for NASA’s first astronaut Moon landing since 1972.<\/p>\n

Mars rover finds strongest hints yet of ancient life <\/a><\/p>\n

NASA scientists say it is the closest they have come to discovering ancient life on Mars.<\/p>\n

That mission, Artemis 3, is a far more ambitious and complex endeavour, currently planned for 2027 and involving a lunar lander variant of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket.<\/p>\n

Artemis 2 will use NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, and its Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin.<\/p>\n

Last year, NASA delayed the mission by several months to April 2026.<\/p>\n

“We intend to keep that commitment,” Lakiesha Hawkins, an acting senior official in NASA’s exploration unit, said on Tuesday, local time.<\/p>\n

Moon’s ‘Grand Canyons’ formed in just 10 minutes, study suggests<\/a><\/p>\n

Projectiles flying faster than bullets from a blast 130 times bigger than the global nuclear stockpile helped form giant lunar canyons, according to a new study.<\/p>\n

She added that the readiness of NASA’s SLS and Orion spacecraft could potentially warrant an earlier launch date, but that safety considerations will ultimately guide when the mission launches.<\/p>\n

The Orion capsule will ride atop the giant, 98-metre-tall SLS rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first time the spacecraft duo will fly with humans.<\/p>\n

Artemis 2 will fly astronauts Reid Wiseman, the mission’s commander who last flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station in 2014; Victor Glover, the pilot who flew to space in 2020 on a SpaceX ISS mission; Christina Koch, a mission specialist who flew on a Soyuz ISS mission in 2019; and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, another mission specialist who will fly to space for the first time.<\/p>\n

Mr Hansen will become the first Canadian to fly in the vicinity of the Moon.<\/p>\n

Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA’s first crewed flight in its Artemis program \u2014 a trip around the Moon and back \u2014 is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[3105,63353,64,63,4935,44828,131,108940,128,285,5437,51322],"class_list":{"0":"post-165540","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-artemis","9":"tag-artemis-2","10":"tag-au","11":"tag-australia","12":"tag-moon","13":"tag-moon-landing","14":"tag-nasa","15":"tag-reid-wiseman","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-space","18":"tag-spacex","19":"tag-victor-glover"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}