Humans Are Going Back to the Moon (Sort Of)

For the first time since 1972, human beings will swing around the Moon. Not land — just fly around it. And somehow, that’s even more exciting than it sounds.

Monday marks the peak moment of NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, when a crew of astronauts will loop around the Moon and come back home. No one has traveled that far from Earth in over 50 years. To put that in perspective, the last humans to see the Moon up close were riding in a spacecraft with less computing power than your smartphone.

So why is everyone so excited about a flyby? Buckle up — because this is actually a really big deal.

Why Are We Going Back?

Let’s rewind. In the 1960s and 70s, NASA’s Apollo program landed 12 astronauts on the Moon. It was one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Then… we stopped. Budget cuts, shifting priorities, and the sheer difficulty of deep space travel meant humans never went back.

But the Moon isn’t just a cool rock to visit. It’s a stepping stone. NASA’s Artemis program — named after the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology — is designed to return humans to the Moon, and eventually use it as a launchpad for missions to Mars.

Think of it like training for a marathon. You don’t just wake up one day and run 26 miles. You run shorter distances first, build your strength, and learn what works. Artemis 2 is one of those training runs. A long, crucial, borderline terrifying training run — in space.

What Is Artemis 2, Exactly?

Artemis 2 is the second mission in NASA’s Artemis program, and the first one with actual humans on board. The crew of four — three NASA astronauts and one Canadian Space Agency astronaut — are riding inside the Orion spacecraft, which sits on top of the most powerful rocket ever built: NASA’s Space Launch System, or SLS.

Here’s a fun way to picture how powerful this rocket is. The SLS produces more thrust — basically, more pushing force — than the Saturn V rockets that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon. And those were already the most powerful rockets humans had ever built at the time. The SLS is essentially a Saturn V that’s been hitting the gym.

The mission isn’t landing on the Moon. Instead, it’s testing everything needed to eventually do that safely. The Orion capsule, the life support systems, the communication equipment, the crew’s ability to function in deep space — all of it is being put through its paces on this trip.

The Flyby: The Main Event

Here’s where things get genuinely spectacular.

On Monday, Artemis 2 reaches the highlight of its mission: a close flyby of the Moon. The spacecraft will swing around the far side — the side that permanently faces away from Earth, the side no human eye has seen directly since the Apollo era — and use the Moon’s gravity like a slingshot.

Think of it like a figure skater pulling their arms in to spin faster. When the spacecraft dips close to the Moon, the Moon’s gravity grabs it and whips it around, giving it a speed boost to head back toward Earth. This technique is called a “free return trajectory,” and it’s an elegant piece of orbital physics. Basically, the Moon does some of the driving for free.

During this flyby, the crew will travel roughly 370,000 kilometers from Earth — about the same as flying around our planet’s equator nine times, back to back. That’s the farthest any human will have traveled from Earth since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

For a few hours, four people will be completely cut off from Earth. Radio signals from Mission Control in Houston take a few seconds to arrive at that distance, and when the spacecraft swings behind the Moon, contact goes dark entirely. The crew will be utterly alone, farther from home than any living person.

If that doesn’t give you chills, check your pulse.

Why Does a Flyby Even Matter?

Fair question. If they’re not landing, why bother?

Because space exploration is terrifyingly complex, and skipping steps gets people killed.

Before you trust a new car with your family on a highway, you want to know the brakes work. Before you trust a spacecraft with human lives in deep space, you need to know everything works — the life support that keeps the crew breathing, the heat shield that stops the capsule from burning up on re-entry, the navigation systems, the communication tools, the physical and psychological endurance of the crew.

Artemis 2 is checking every single one of those boxes. It’s gathering real-world data that no simulation or uncrewed test flight can fully provide.

In other words: this mission exists so that future missions don’t fail.

There’s also the human factor. Astronauts will experience the reality of deep space travel with living, breathing bodies. How does extended microgravity — the weightlessness of space — affect them over this journey? How does the isolation feel? How does the crew work together under real pressure? These aren’t just interesting questions. They’re critical ones for planning longer missions to the Moon’s surface and, eventually, Mars.

What This Changes

Artemis 2 signals something profound: the era of deep human space exploration is restarting.

For a generation of people, space travel meant watching shuttle missions orbit Earth a few hundred kilometers up — impressive, but essentially local. The International Space Station, for all its wonder, sits in low Earth orbit, closer to Earth than you might think. It’s roughly the distance from New York to Philadelphia, straight up.

The Moon is 1,000 times farther away. Mars is thousands of times farther still.

Artemis 2 is humanity’s first real step back into deep space, and it carries enormous symbolic weight alongside its scientific mission. It includes a Canadian crew member, making it the first lunar mission with international crewmembers — a sign that deep space exploration is becoming a collaborative human endeavor, not just a US-vs.-Soviet competition.

And this time, when NASA returns astronauts to the Moon’s surface — which Artemis 3 aims to do — it will include the first woman and first person of color to walk on the Moon.

What Comes Next?

Artemis 2 is, in many ways, the beginning of a much longer story.

Artemis 3 is planned to actually land astronauts on the Moon’s south pole — a region of intense scientific interest because radar data suggests there may be water ice hiding in permanently shadowed craters there. Water means drinking. Water means oxygen to breathe. Water means hydrogen fuel. In other words, water means the Moon could eventually support longer missions, or even act as a base camp for voyages deeper into the solar system.

Beyond that, NASA and its international partners have floated the idea of a small space station called the Gateway, orbiting the Moon and serving as a hub for future missions.

The dream — ambitious, audacious, and maybe a little crazy — is that all of this leads to humans standing on Mars within our lifetimes.

That journey starts Monday, with four astronauts swinging around the Moon.

Half a century after the last humans left that pale light in the sky behind, we’re going back. And this time, we’re not planning to stop.