NASA's Artemis II mission has reached a landmark milestone, with its four-person crew travelling farther from Earth than any humans in history, surpassing the record set by the Apollo 13 crew in April 1970. Apollo 13 holds the record for the greatest distance from Earth ever achieved by humans, at approximately 400,171 kilometres (248,655 miles), a figure that stood unchallenged for over five decades.
The Artemis II crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — are conducting a crewed lunar flyby, the first such mission since the Apollo era. Their trajectory takes them around the far side of the Moon and back, testing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System under crewed conditions ahead of future lunar landing missions.
The mission represents a significant step in NASA's broader Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to the lunar surface and eventually establish a sustained presence on and around the Moon. Jeremy Hansen becomes the first Canadian to travel to the vicinity of the Moon, a historic milestone for the Canadian Space Agency.
NASA has not independently confirmed the naming of a lunar crater during this mission as of the time of publication. Readers are advised that some details reported in early coverage of this mission could not be verified and have been omitted pending official confirmation from NASA.
