Humans on the moon by 2025?
(1/9/24) NASA announced new Artemis timeline
On Tuesday, January 9, 2024, NASA held a media teleconference to provide an update to the timeline for the upcoming Artemis missions, which will carry humans back to the moon. Artemis 1 successfully completed its mission in 2022 with an uncrewed test flight that orbited the moon. Artemis 2 will be the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in more than 50 years. Its new launch date is no earlier than September 2025. The following mission, Artemis 3, will be the first to return humans to the moon since the Apollo missions. Artemis 3 is now slated for September 2026. And Artemis 4, another mission to take humans to the moon, will be no earlier than September 2028.
NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission: updates
NASA's Artemis 2 lunar mission in 2024 will send the first astronauts around the moon in nearly 50 years. The mission will launch four astronauts around the moon on a lunar flyby aboard an Orion spacecraft using a Space Launch System rocket. Artemis 2 is an eight day mission that will send three NASA astronauts and one Canadian Space Agency astronaut around the moon on a free-return trajectory. It is the last test flight before the Artemis 3 crewed moon landing mission in 2025.Artemis 1 launches to the moon Wed Nov. 16th 2022 1:47 am
And we have liftoff! After many delays, NASA’s giant Space Launch System rocket, carrying the uncrewed Orion capsule, lifted off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:47 a.m. EST this morning. It blasted out some 8.8 million pounds of thrust, making it the most powerful rocket ever to launch from Earth. The rocket lit up the dark night in the early morning hours, a bright beacon in the dark. It's a 1st step in the goal of returning humans to the surface of the moon and perhaps toward leaving the Earth-moon system, for Mars. It'll spend 25 days in space, orbiting the moon before returning to Earth.
Artemis 1, 2 and 3
Approximately two years after Artemis 1, it will be Artemis 2‘s turn. Artemis 2 is a crewed flight that’ll perform tests in Earth orbit. Finally, in 2025 – if the program can stay on schedule –
the Artemis 3 crew of four people will gear up for the 236,000-miles-long (380,000-km-long) journey to the moon. Overall, they’ll be in space about a month.
The four astronauts will spend six days at our natural satellite’s south pole, a place that scientists have discovered in recent decades has large amounts of water ice.
NASA's Artemis 2 mission is returning astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. See live mission updates here.
