For the first time in 54 years, American astronauts are heading back to the moon. The Artemis II is set to launch on April 1, after years of delays and concerns regarding landing sites and the shrinking moon.

Four astronauts will be sent up this time: Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, and Reid Wiseman. Glover will be the first Black astronaut to circle the moon, while Koch will be the first woman, and Hansen will be the first Canadian.

While this crew won't actually walk on the moon - that'll be the crew of Artemis IV in 2028 - they'll be the first to leave Earth's low orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Just a few years earlier, on July 20, 1969, NASA landed its first crewed spacecraft on the moon. The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to the US to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. He issued that challenge as the USSR dominated the earliest milestones of space exploration.

Just months before Kennedy's deadline, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the crew of Apollo 11, landed their small spaceship, crawled outside, and planted their boots into the ground along with an American flag and some scientific instruments.

Apollo 11 often hogs the history books, but many Apollo missions before it made the astronauts' conquest possible, and the missions that followed added to the program's long list of accomplishments. In total, NASA put 12 astronauts on the moon's surface. In the five decades since, however, no US spacecraft has returned with people. But that's all about to change. To celebrate the latest moon mission, here's a look back at NASA's Apollo missions, which flew between 1968 and 1972 and succeeded in putting the first humans on the moon.

The crew of the Artemis II will fly to the moon on a 10-day mission beginning on April 1, 2026.

After years of delays, the crew of the Artemis II will begin their lunar flyby mission on April 1, weather permitting. Its four astronauts will circle the Earth twice to test the spacecraft's systems before circling the moon — they won't land on the moon, but they will be the first crewed mission of the Orion spacecraft, and the first four people to leave low-Earth orbit since 1972.

It's also the second flight of the Space Launch System (SLS), replacing the previous Space Shuttle program. The SLS is a super-heavy-lift rocket designed to (eventually) take astronauts farther into space, even to Mars. It's over 100 feet taller than the space shuttles NASA has previously used, and produces 15% more thrust at launch, per NASA. If all goes well, the astronauts will be back on Earth on April 10.

The goal is for astronauts to once again walk on the moon in 2028 as part of the Artemis IV mission.

NASA's Artemis II Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft on Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center on March 31, 2026. President Donald Trump directed NASA to put astronauts on the moon again by 2024. It'll take a little longer than that, but it seems he may have his wish by 2028 with Artemis IV.

"We've been given an ambitious and exciting goal. History has proven when we're given a task by the president, along with the resources and the tools, we can deliver," then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in 2019. "We are committed to making this happen."

To achieve this goal, NASA has partnered with Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has its own plans to colonize the moon by building a "self-growing city" on its surface.

(Busines Insider April 9, 2026)