Science NBC News 2026 will be the year NASA astronauts fly around the moon again — if all goes to plan

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If all goes according to NASA’s plans, 2026 will finally be the year that astronauts once again launch to the moon.

In a matter of months, four astronauts are poised to fly around the moon on a roughly 10-day mission — the closest humans will have gotten in more than half a century.

The flight, known as Artemis II, could lift off as early as February and would be a long-awaited jump start to America’s lagging return-to-the-moon program. The mission will serve as a crucial test of NASA’s next-generation Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, which have been in development for more than a decade and faced years of setbacks and severe budget overruns. The system has never carried a crew before.

Returning to the moon has been a priority for President Donald Trump since his first term, and the current administration has placed renewed emphasis on dominating the intensifying space race between the U.S. and China. Chinese officials have pledged to land their own astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030.

Beyond the geopolitical implications, the Artemis II mission is designed to usher in a new era of space exploration, with the goal of eventually establishing bases for long-duration stays on the moon before astronauts someday venture on to Mars.

“Within the next three years, we are going to land American astronauts again on the moon, but this time with the infrastructure to stay,” Jared Isaacman, NASA’s new administrator, told NBC News in an interview last week after he was sworn in.

For some scientists, the excitement around returning to the moon stems from the prospect of investigating enduring mysteries about the moon’s formation and evolution — such as violent collisions in the nascent solar system that created it and where its water originated — which came into focus during the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s.

“As you can imagine, lunar scientists have had a lot of pent up questions for decades,” said Brett Denevi, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Answering some of those questions could shed light on similar processes that occurred during our planet’s formation, according to Denevi.

“Earth is kind of a terrible record-keeper,” she said. “With plate tectonics, weather — these things have just totally erased its very earliest history. But on the moon, you have this terrain that formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and it’s just sitting there on the surface for us to explore.”

Although the Artemis II mission won’t land on the lunar surface, it will test various technologies, docking maneuvers and life-support systems — first in Earth orbit and then in orbit around the moon — that will be essential for future missions.

NASA previously launched the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule on an uncrewed test flight around the moon — the Artemis I mission — for 3 1/2 weeks in 2022.

The space agency had hoped to launch Artemis II in 2024, but costly delays repeatedly pushed it and subsequent missions back.

“There’s a lot riding on this, both good and bad,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration. “Everything seems to be coming together, but this is the first time with humans on this rocket, and we’ve never tested this life-support system in space before.”

No launch date has been announced, but it is expected between February and April. The crew on board will be NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The foursome was selected for the mission in 2023. Wiseman, Glover and Koch will make their second trips to space, while Hansen will be making his spaceflight debut.

Last weekend, the astronauts completed a key launch-day rehearsal, which involved donning their flight suits, boarding the Orion spacecraft and running through the countdown sequence to the point just before liftoff.

The Artemis program was established under the first Trump administration in 2019, and it salvaged the Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule from prior stalled or canceled projects at NASA. The space agency had been working on a next-generation booster since 2010, a year before it retired the space shuttles. The Orion spacecraft, meanwhile, was originally designed for the Constellation Program, which was established by President George W. Bush to conduct crewed flights to the moon and Mars.

Last week, Trump doubled down on his return-to-the-moon agenda in an executive order that directed NASA to prioritize “expanding human reach and American presence in space” by landing astronauts on the lunar surface by 2028.

“This is the culmination of what is now almost a 15-year effort,” Dreier said. “Assuming it works, it’ll be seen as a major win for the administration. But if this doesn’t work, or if something calamitous happens, that will really reset everything.”

Artemis II is intended to pave the way for the Artemis III mission in 2027, which is expected to land four astronauts near the moon’s south pole, a region vastly different from where the Apollo astronauts left their bootprints.

Whereas the Apollo moon landings occurred within a narrow band around the moon’s equator, the south polar region is a more challenging place to land because the terrain is pockmarked with craters. These permanently shadowed basins are thought to house abundant water ice, a precious resource for establishing a long-term presence on the moon and for future crewed missions deeper in the solar system.

“Apollo gave us the framework to understand the moon,” Denevi said, “and now we have the foundation to ask different questions.”

Denevi leads the geology team for the Artemis III flight, a role that involves deciding where the crew members will roam after they land, what types of fieldwork they will conduct and which samples they will collect to bring home. She is particularly interested in samples from the moon’s shadowed craters, which are among the coldest places in the solar system.

“When I first started studying the moon, I thought I’d spend my whole career studying historical data,” she said. “Now to have the opportunity to be involved in going to collect new samples that can provide new pieces to this puzzle, instead of trying to rearrange all of the old pieces, that’s going to be a huge step forward.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com