Welcome aboard the Artemis II mission—NASA’s next step toward returning humans to the Moon. This mission will send astronauts on a free-return trajectory around the Moon, meaning they’ll loop around it and naturally be pulled back toward Earth by gravity. The spacecraft will travel nearly 240,000 miles from Earth, using the Moon’s gravitational pull to guide its path—no landing this time, but it’s still a critical test of deep space travel. As they orbit the Moon, astronauts will observe the lun