See Photos From All 10 Days of NASA’s Artemis II Moon Mission

NASA's Artemis II mission crew successfully completed a critical 10-day lunar flyby test flight in late 2024, demonstrating the Orion spacecraft's capabilities for future human Moon landings. The mission, which launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, served as the final comprehensive test before NASA attempts to return astronauts to the lunar surface with Artemis III. The four-person crew, consisting of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, executed a precise trajectory that took them around the far side of the Moon. During their journey, they tested the spacecraft's life support systems, communication arrays with Earth during the distant lunar orbit, and the manual piloting controls. The mission's success validates the Orion spacecraft's design and operational readiness for longer-duration missions. A newly released photo series documents the entire 10-day journey, from the dramatic launch and Earth-rise views to the spacecraft's lonely voyage around the Moon and the triumphant splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. These images provide unprecedented visual documentation of a human-rated lunar mission since the Apollo era and are crucial for public engagement and engineering analysis. The success of Artemis II clears the final major hurdle for NASA's planned Artemis III mission, which aims to land the first woman and the next man on the lunar south pole.