Artemis II: The 10 Days of Four People Who Traveled to the Far Side of the Moon for the First Time in Half a Century

On April 11, 2026, Japan time, a spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. The four people aboard had traveled farther from Earth than anyone in human history and returned, and they were also the first people in more than 50 years to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes. The video follows the course of this mission, Artemis II, step by step from launch to return.

The Artemis program is the umbrella name for NASA's effort to send humans back to the Moon and eventually make it possible to live there. The rocket is the Space Launch System (SLS), developed as a successor to the Space Shuttle, and the spacecraft that carries the crew is called Orion.

Artemis I, carried out in 2022 as the first stage, was a test that sent an uncrewed Orion to the Moon. Artemis II is the first test flight with people aboard. It does not land on the Moon; it simply loops around the far side and comes back. Even so, preparations took more than three years after Artemis I, and four crew members were selected. The video describes these four as also serving as "living test subjects" for verifying the spacecraft's performance.

Artemis II was originally supposed to fly much earlier. Early plans had the launch around 2020, but it slipped to 2024, then 2025, and finally to April 2026. Problems were found in the heat shield and the life-support system, and each time an issue surfaced, the launch date was pushed back by several months.

In February 2026, a full dress rehearsal was held, but a liquid hydrogen leak was discovered. Just when it seemed the next rehearsal had finally gone through, an abnormal helium flow occurred. For that reason, the video says, no one involved could have been calm on launch day.

At 7:35 a.m. on April 2, 2026, the RS-25 rocket engines, the same family used on the Space Shuttle, ignited, followed by the solid rocket boosters. The vehicle, weighing about 2,600 tons, began to accelerate and broke the sound barrier 56 seconds after liftoff. About a minute later, the solid rocket boosters finished their job, separated, and fell away.

Eight minutes after launch, the SLS main engines shut down as planned. What remained after separation was Orion, carrying the crew, and the cryogenic rocket stage used to propel it. Eighteen minutes after launch, four wings carrying a total of 15,000 solar cells began to deploy. With these panels, Orion became a self-sufficient spacecraft able to power its own life-support and communications equipment. The video calls everything up to this point a great success for the first stage.

Right after that, an unexpected problem arose. The toilet aboard Orion suddenly began sounding an alarm. It was a space toilet said to have taken more than ten years to develop, yet it was temporarily put out of service. The cause was urine freezing and clogging the drain line. To clear the blockage, the crew had to change Orion's attitude so that sunlight would hit the drain line.

One crew member said something to the effect that being able to call themselves a space plumber didn't feel too bad, and that the toilet might be the most important piece of equipment on the spacecraft. The video argues that this is genuinely no laughing matter, but a problem humanity cannot avoid as it seriously sets its sights on space, starting with the Moon.

The Apollo spacecraft had no toilet. Crew members had to relieve themselves into bags with an adhesive rim around the opening, add disinfectant by hand, and then seal them. "Leaks" in both senses of the word were apparently common, and on Apollo 10 the contents were reportedly seen floating around the cabin. Toilets are indispensable for exploring the solar system, including the Moon and Mars. The uncrewed Artemis I had no toilet, so whether it would fail could only be learned once people were aboard. And it did fail. The video frames this failure as precisely what will make it possible to do better next time.

On day two of the mission, the translunar injection was carried out, arguably the most important engine burn of the entire mission. This is the maneuver that takes Orion out of Earth orbit and sends it toward the Moon. Orion's main engine fired for 5 minutes and 50 seconds, and the crew began their journey to the Moon.

The path Orion entered is known as a "free-return trajectory." Even if its engine were to stop working from that point on, Orion would swing around the far side of the Moon and naturally return to Earth, mainly through the gravity of the Moon and Earth. It is the same idea that brought the crew of Apollo 13 home safely in 1970, after an oxygen tank explosion forced them to abandon their lunar landing. The video says that experience gained from a failure half a century ago is serving as insurance, and remarks that space exploration may be built on just this kind of accumulated experience.

On day three of the mission, as Orion headed toward the Moon, Commander Wiseman captured Earth outside the window on camera. A blue sphere glows against the blackness of space. At the moment the shutter clicked, every human being except the four aboard Orion was inside that photo.

The video explains that the photo shows far more than can be dismissed as just "the blue Earth." The faint green curves glowing at the top and bottom edges of the planet are auroras. They form when the solar wind is funneled along Earth's magnetic field toward the regions near the North and South Poles and collides with molecules in the atmosphere, causing them to glow. The slightly brighter area at the lower right of Earth is zodiacal light, produced when sunlight reflects off dust scattered throughout the solar system. And the bright point of light further to the lower right is Venus. The video says the photo makes it clear that planets like Venus and Earth, as well as the fine dust that creates zodiacal light, lie in nearly the same plane.

The four did not go simply to enjoy the view; throughout the 10-day mission, they were also test subjects. The last time humans went beyond Earth's magnetic field was more than 50 years ago. The video says this was the first time in human history that it was possible to measure, by the yardstick of modern medicine, what happens to the human body while spending time outside the magnetic field exposed to intense radiation, and how things like bones and sleep change.

Drawing particular attention was a device about the size of a USB flash drive called "AVATAR." Inside are cells derived from each of the four astronauts, modeling the bone marrow that produces their blood. In effect, each crew member's double sits right beside them, exposed to exactly the same radiation. This is reportedly the first time a device carrying human cells has gone beyond the region protected by Earth's magnetic field. The video expects the results to become extremely valuable data both for when people live on the lunar surface under the Artemis program in the future and for missions to Mars.

Even on Mars, which might seem unrelated to this mission, the Perseverance rover was carrying out an important task. At the time, Mars was positioned exactly opposite Earth, on the other side of the Sun. So Perseverance pointed its camera at the Sun.

The purpose was to check the far side of the Sun, invisible from Earth—that is, the face that would soon rotate toward Earth, and thus toward Orion—for solar flares and other dangerous signs. NASA was, quite literally, using Perseverance as a lookout from the most distant place possible.

On day six of the mission, Orion finally swung around the far side of the Moon. Around this time, the crew also witnessed a solar eclipse, with the Moon covering the Sun. When people on the ground watch a solar eclipse, they are standing within the Moon's shadow. But on this occasion, the four watched from right beside the Moon as its enormous disk completely covered the Sun. The video notes that without the repeated launch delays, this sight might never have been seen.

From Orion, a photo was also taken in which a crescent Earth appears to sink below the lunar horizon. Rather than a sunset, it is an "Earthset." The crew of Apollo 8, the first to pass behind the Moon, photographed an "Earthrise," and the video presents this new image as its counterpart. The photo also shows the Moon's craters and traces of lava that cooled and solidified, and the video says it should be useful for research on lunar topography as well.

Earth disappearing from view also means that communication with Earth is cut off. That period lasted about 40 minutes. For those 40 minutes, the four were the loneliest beings among all the people in the world.

The distance from Earth kept growing until it finally reached about 406,700 km. Humanity had broken its record for the farthest distance ever traveled from Earth. The video says that, in the history of the universe, the humans who were farthest from all other humans were without a doubt the four aboard Orion.

On day 10 of the mission, the time came to return. The video says that, just as with the launch, no one involved could have watched calmly at this point either.

A spacecraft returning from space plunges into Earth's atmosphere, and compression heating and frictional heating make its surface extremely hot. What protects the vehicle and crew from that heat is a thick heat shield. However, when the spacecraft from the uncrewed Artemis I flight was recovered, this shield had been damaged in a way no one had anticipated. Its surface had countless cracks, and there were also signs that parts had chipped away. Had the damage been just a little deeper, the entire spacecraft might have broken apart during reentry—just like the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Before launch, NASA faced a choice between two options: redesign the heat shield from scratch and delay by several years, or keep the heat shield as it was and adjust the reentry path instead. The latter was chosen. The video says that the four quite literally entrusted their lives to that decision.

When Orion entered the atmosphere, the vehicle was engulfed in plasma and radio contact was lost. Later, one of the flight controllers who had been watching from the ground said something to the effect that if anyone hadn't felt anxious about bringing this spacecraft home, it was only because they didn't have a pulse. In reality, the return went remarkably according to plan, and after Orion splashed gently down in the Pacific, the four astronauts emerged one after another.

The video stresses that Artemis II was not a journey in search of new discoveries. It was a test run—a flight meant to confirm one thing only: whether humans could be taken near the Moon for the first time in more than half a century and brought back safely. And the four returned to Earth on their own two feet.

The next mission, Artemis III, is scheduled for 2027, with a docking test between Orion and a lunar lander planned. Artemis IV, scheduled for 2028, will carry out a crewed lunar landing. The "small step" for the spacecraft, the crew, and the many people involved is over, but the "giant leap" is still to come—and the video closes by asking how far humanity's leap will go.