NASA’s Artemis II astronauts achieved a historic milestone on Monday as they voyaged to the deepest point in space ever reached by humans, surpassing the distance set nearly 56 years ago by the Apollo 13 crew.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that the crew conducted a six-hour flyby over the moon’s far side, a region largely hidden from view of Earth, providing both a symbolic and scientific triumph for the United States’ Artemis programme.
As the Orion spacecraft sailed through space, approximately 252,755 miles from Earth, the astronauts were greeted by a pre-recorded message from the late Apollo veteran Jim Lovell, who said, “Welcome to my old neighbourhood. It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be, but don’t forget to enjoy the view… good luck and Godspeed.” Lovell, who flew on the Apollo 8 and 13 missions, passed away last year at the age of 97.
The crew—U.S. astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—broke the previous Apollo 13 distance record of 248,000 miles, using lunar gravity to aid their trajectory, much like the Apollo crew did after their spacecraft malfunctioned in 1970.
During the flyby, the astronauts took the opportunity to assign provisional names to previously unnamed lunar craters.
Hansen proposed naming one crater “Integrity,” after the Orion capsule, and suggested another be called “Carroll,” in honour of Wiseman’s late wife, who passed away from cancer in 2020.
Hansen reflected emotionally, “It’s a bright spot on the Moon, and we would like to call that Carroll,” highlighting the personal significance of the gesture.
The mission allowed the crew to observe the moon’s far side from as close as 4,000 miles above its surface, providing a rare vantage point for detailed photographs of sunlight grazing the lunar horizon and the Earth appearing as a distant, basketball-sized sphere.
Few humans have ever seen this side of the moon directly, limited previously to the Apollo missions.
Monday’s flyby represents a high point of the nearly ten-day Artemis II mission, the first crewed test flight of NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028.
This programme seeks to establish a sustainable U.S. presence on the moon over the next decade as a precursor for potential human missions to Mars.
The flyby plunged the crew temporarily into darkness and a brief communications blackout as the moon blocked NASA’s Deep Space Network, highlighting the technical and navigational challenges of deep-space travel.
The astronauts were equipped with professional cameras to capture rare and scientifically valuable images of the moon and Earth, marking a celestial perspective unseen by humans for more than half a century.
The Artemis II mission underscores both the United States’ ambition to lead the next era of lunar exploration and the ongoing efforts to expand humanity’s reach beyond Earth, blending historic milestones with personal narratives and cutting-edge science. - April 7, 2026
