Artemis II

Artemis II launched on 1 April 2026 and splashed down in the Pacific on 10 April, completing the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit in more than fifty years. The crew of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen flew Orion on a ten-day lunar flyby, passing within roughly 8,900 km of the Moon before a lofted re-entry designed to reduce heat-shield peak loading. Six days after splashdown the crew gave a post-flight press conference at Johnson Space Center, at which Commander Wiseman praised the heat shield as looking "wonderful" and pledged a "fine-tooth comb" inspection of every atom.

Three post-mission technical questions remain open. The O2 manifold helium leak operated at 10 times the rate ground tests predicted; a redesigned valve is non-negotiable for Artemis IV lunar-orbit operations where blowdown mode is not available. The heat shield received an immediate visual clearance from Isaacman on 13 April but the formal 30-day KSC scan had not yet begun at the time of the crew conference. Crew radiation dose data from a mission that absorbed a G3 geomagnetic storm and an M7.5 solar flare has not been released after three scheduled public windows.

The mission cost approximately $4 billion against a $93 billion programme total, making each open engineering question a public accountability issue as much as a technical one. Artemis II's completion activates the Artemis III stack: the SLS core stage leaves Michoud Assembly Facility on 20 April, while the Orion capsule and ESM-3 are already at KSC inside the Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building. China's crewed lunar target of 2030 remains the schedule pressure against which every unresolved anomaly is measured.