NASA officials on Tuesday said the agency's first crewed flight in its Artemis programme - a trip around the moon and back - is on track for launch in April and could potentially be moved up to February 2026.
The space agency's Artemis programme is the flagship U.S. effort to return humans to the moon, a multibillion dollar series of missions that rivals a similar effort by China, which is aiming for a 2030 astronaut moon landing.
Artemis 2, a 10-day flight in which a crew of four astronauts will fly around the moon and back, is a precursor test to the agency's first astronaut moon landing since 1972.
That mission, Artemis 3, is a far more ambitious and complex endeavor currently planned for 2027 and involving a moon lander variant of SpaceX's Starship rocket.
Artemis 2 involves NASA's Space Launch System rocket, built by Boeing and Northrop Grumman, and its Orion capsule, built by Lockheed Martin. Last year, NASA delayed the mission by several months to April 2026.
"We intend to keep that commitment," Lakiesha Hawkins, an acting senior official in NASA's exploration unit, said during a news conference on Tuesday of the 2026 date.
She added that the readiness of NASA's and Orion spacecraft could potentially warrant an earlier launch date, but that safety considerations will ultimately guide when the mission launches.
The Orion capsule will ride atop the giant, 98 metres (322-foot-tall) SLS rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the first time the spacecraft duo will fly with humans.
Artemis 2 will fly astronauts Reid Wiseman, the mission's commander who last flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station in 2014; Victor Glover, the pilot who flew to space in 2020 on a SpaceX ISS mission; Christina Koch, a mission specialist who flew on a Soyuz ISS mission in 2019; and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, another mission specialist who will fly to space for the first time.
Hansen's inclusion will mark the first Canadian to fly in the vicinity of the moon.
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NASA officials on Tuesday said the agency's first crewed flight in its Artemis programme - a trip around the moon and back - is on track for launch in...
A teacher who was stabbed by a student fascinated by "Nazi ideologies" in a middle school in northeastern France is in stable condition, the French education minister told reporters on Wednesday.
A shooter killed at least one person and wounded others in a shooting on Wednesday at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, local and federal authorities said.
Iran has no intention to build nuclear weapons, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, just days before international sanctions could be reimposed on his country over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
Kabul’s groundwater is falling to record lows, pushing many residents to buy drinking water from mobile tankers, according to the Ministry of Energy and Water (MoEW).
AnewZ has learned that India has once again blocked Azerbaijan’s application for full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, while Pakistan’s recent decision to consider diplomatic relations with Armenia has been coordinated with Baku as part of Azerbaijan’s peace agenda.
A day of mourning has been declared in Portugal to pay respect to victims who lost their lives in the Lisbon Funicular crash which happened on Wednesday evening.
A Polish Air Force pilot was killed on Thursday when an F-16 fighter jet crashed during a training flight ahead of the 2025 Radom International Air Show.
Video from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) showed on Friday (19 September) the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii erupting and spewing lava.
At least eight people have died and more than 90 others were injured following a catastrophic gas tanker explosion on a major highway in Mexico City’s Iztapalapa district on Wednesday, authorities confirmed.
In a discovery that pushes the limits of our cosmic imagination, astronomers have revealed a colossal bridge of gas and stars stretching between galaxies, accompanied by the longest tail ever observed, an intergalactic structure on a scale that rewrites what we know about the Universe.
The GLOBSEC Initiative on the Future of Cyberspace Cooperation has released a new research paper examining NATO’s potential use of artificial intelligence in cybersecurity.
A nationwide survey in Kazakhstan shows a split opinion on the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, with 40.5% viewing it positively and 37.4% seeing it as a threat to learning quality, according to the Institute of Public Policy reported in The Astana Times.
Scientists and guests gathered at Boston University in Massachusetts on Thursday (18 September) for the 35th annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, which honours bizarre scientific discoveries.
Palaeontologists in Peru unveiled the fossilized skeleton of an ancient, dolphin-like creature estimated to be between 8 and 12 million years old.
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