On the heels of a successful unmanned Artemis I moon mission, NASA is on track to launch a crew of astronauts into lunar orbit with Artemis II in November of 2024, the United States space agency said.
In a press briefing on Tuesday, NASA's Jim Free said the agency was learning as much as possible from the Artemis I mission, which ended in December when an unmanned Orion capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a nearly monthlong journey in space, which took it around the moon.
"We're learning as much as we possibly can from Artemis I to ensure we fully understand every aspect of our systems and feed those lessons learned into how we plan for and fly crewed missions," Free said. "Safely flying crew is our top priority for Artemis II."
The Artemis mission aims to return U.S. astronauts to the moon, including at least one woman. The original goal of achieving this by 2024 has been pushed back to 2025 at the earliest.
Artemis II, the first manned flight around the moon, is to be followed by another manned flight including a moon landing. The last human mission to land on a satellite was carried out by NASA in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission.
The Artemis I mission saw an Orion capsule traveling more than 2.2 million kilometers (1.36 million miles) during more than 25 days in space, NASA said.
During the mission, Orion performed two lunar flybys, coming within 130 kilometers of the moon's surface and traveling as far as 432,000 kilometers from Earth, the longest distance ever traveled by a spacecraft made for human passengers, "to intentionally stress systems before flying with a crew," the space agency said.
The European Space Agency (ESA) and space agencies from several other countries are also involved in the moon program.
The U.S. put 12 astronauts on the moon with the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972, the only country to have achieved the feat so far.
