Less than two weeks after NASA’s Artemis II crew returned from the Moon, the agency says observations from the mission are already informing plans for a permanent lunar base, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told NBC’s Lester Holt this week.
The Artemis II mission, which launched April 1 and splashed down April 10, sent astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a roughly 10-day journey around the Moon — the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years. At their farthest point, the crew traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, setting a new distance record for human spaceflight.
During their April 6 lunar flyby, the astronauts captured more than 7,000 images of the Moon’s surface, including detailed views along the terminator — the boundary between lunar day and night — where low-angle sunlight reveals craters, ridges, and surface features that are difficult to see under direct illumination. Those imaging conditions closely resemble what astronauts will encounter at the lunar South Pole, where NASA plans to land crews beginning in 2028.
Last month, Isaacman announced that NASA had canceled plans to build a space station in lunar orbit and will instead repurpose those components into a $20 billion base on the Moon’s surface. The shift follows a broader Artemis program overhaul announced in February that adds an Artemis III mission in mid-2027 to test rendezvous and docking with lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, ahead of a targeted Moon landing in 2028.
Engineers are now analyzing data from Artemis II’s flight to identify any issues to address before Artemis III. Initial assessments of the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield show significantly less char loss than the uncrewed Artemis I mission, suggesting the thermal protection system performed well during reentry at nearly 35 times the speed of sound.
The mobile launcher used for Artemis II has already been rolled back to Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building, where teams are preparing to stack the next rocket.