Five missions. Eight named crew members. One escalating sequence from an empty capsule to boots, habitats, and a sustained human presence on the Moon.
Launch simulator armed. Press Launch SLS.
New: open four illustrated engineering guides ↓Choose a system to see the physics underneath the mission: changing orbital energy, sustaining a crew, surviving lunar-return re-entry, and operating where sunlight barely clears the horizon.
SLS first reaches a temporary Earth orbit. About 90 minutes after liftoff, the ICPS upper stage performs an approximately 18-minute translunar injection burn. The burn raises Orion’s orbital energy and commits it to a precise path that intersects the moving Moon.
The crew module is the pressurized capsule and the only part that returns to Earth. The European Service Module supplies electrical power, propulsion, thermal control, water, oxygen, and nitrogen until it separates before atmospheric entry.
Orion deliberately dips into the atmosphere, generates lift to climb back out, then enters again. This skip entry divides heating and deceleration into two pulses. Avcoat on the 16.5-foot heat shield ablates—burning away in a controlled way—to carry heat from the cabin.
Permanently shadowed craters can preserve water ice, while the Sun stays extremely low over nearby terrain. That creates long, black shadows, harsh glare, power constraints, temperature extremes, and communications blind spots around crater walls.
Plot twist: Artemis III is now a 2027 crewed docking demonstration in low Earth orbit. The first planned surface landing moves to Artemis IV in early 2028.
Read how launch, docking, cislunar flight, and landing fit together on the illustrated route. Every stage links to the matching mission inside Spacian.
SLS produces up to 8.8 million pounds of thrust to send Orion and its crew beyond low Earth orbit.
Open Artemis I →Artemis III is planned to rehearse rendezvous, docking, life support, communications, propulsion, and xEVA operations.
Open Artemis III →Orion carries and sustains four astronauts in deep space, then shields them during the high-speed trip home.
Open Artemis II →For Artemis IV, two crew members are planned to transfer from Orion to a commercial lander and spend about a week on the Moon.
Open Artemis IV →Past dates are actual. Future dates are NASA targets and can move as vehicles, landers, crews, and mission plans mature.
SLS and Orion flew together for the first time. Orion traveled around the Moon and returned through a high-energy re-entry before splashing down in the Pacific.
Prove the integrated SLS-Orion flight system, deep-space navigation, lunar-return heat shield, and ocean recovery without crew.
A crewed Orion flight around the Moon with the same launch, navigation, entry, and recovery chain.
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen became the first crew to fly around the Moon in more than half a century, returning after a 10-day Orion mission.
Prove life support, crew operations, navigation, communications, entry, and recovery on a real lunar flight.
Crewed rendezvous, docking, transfer, and suit demonstrations with commercial lunar lander systems.
Four astronauts are planned to test rendezvous and docking operations between Orion and commercial lunar lander systems—a critical rehearsal for the first surface mission.
Prove Orion-to-lander rendezvous, docking, crew transfer, lander systems, communications, and xEVA interfaces in low Earth orbit.
Commit those vehicles and crew procedures to lunar orbit, where an abort or repair is far harder.
NASA is targeting humanity’s return to the lunar surface. Two crew members would descend from lunar orbit, spend about a week near the South Pole, and return to Orion.
Prove lunar-orbit transfer, precision landing, surface life support, EVA, ascent, redocking, and safe Earth return as one chain.
Repeatable South Pole expeditions that can add science, mobility, power, and surface infrastructure.
NASA anticipates another lunar surface mission using the standardized SLS configuration, beginning the intended cadence of sustained missions on and around the Moon.
Show the landing architecture can be repeated as an operational campaign instead of a single demonstration.
A sustained mission cadence with progressively more capable payloads and surface work.
Artemis is not a stack of hardware milestones. These are the people who flew the Moon and the people training for the next test.
Four people flew around the Moon and returned on April 10, 2026.
The crew preparing for the 2027 rendezvous and docking test.
Actual flight records and vehicle numbers from NASA, turned into a mission-control readout.
Total distance traveled by Orion during the first integrated SLS and Orion flight test.
NASA Artemis I facts ↗Orion hit Earth’s atmosphere around Mach 32 before its Pacific splashdown.
NASA Artemis I facts ↗Small spacecraft rode with Artemis I to investigate the Moon, radiation, and deep-space technologies.
NASA mission timeline ↗Four RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters power the Block 1 stack away from Earth.
NASA SLS facts ↗The crew became the farthest-traveling humans in history on April 6, 2026.
NASA flight record ↗NASA’s updated architecture targets at least one lunar surface landing every year after Artemis IV.
NASA architecture update ↗SLS gets the stack moving. Orion keeps people alive. Landers and suits close the final distance to the lunar surface.
The launch stack combines a core stage, four RS-25 engines, and two five-segment solid rocket boosters.
Orion carries and sustains the crew in deep space and protects them through the high-energy return to Earth.
Commercial lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin are part of the architecture NASA plans to test before surface missions.
The updated Artemis III plan includes testing the new suits alongside docked vehicles and their life-support systems.
Fast answers based on NASA’s current mission architecture and completed flight record.
Artemis III is planned for 2027. Its crew will test Orion rendezvous and docking with one or both commercial lunar lander systems in low Earth orbit.
NASA is targeting Artemis IV for the first crewed landing of the campaign in early 2028, near the lunar South Pole.
Yes. Artemis II launched April 1, 2026, carried four astronauts around the Moon, and splashed down April 10 after a nearly 10-day flight.
Each mission depends on crew safety reviews, SLS and Orion readiness, commercial landers, spacesuits, launch infrastructure, and the objectives proven by the flight before it.
A lifting skip entry divides deceleration and heating into two pulses, gives guidance more control over the splashdown range, and reduces the peak load on the crew. The Avcoat heat shield sacrifices its outer material to carry heat away.
Permanently shadowed craters preserve scientifically valuable water ice. Nearby low-angle sunlight may support power, but it also produces extreme glare, deep shadow, temperature swings, and difficult terrain for crews and autonomous landing systems.
Spacian’s live Moon mission hub follows dated Artemis launches alongside lunar landers and science missions, with calendar updates and mission details.