The Artemis II mission that will take a crew of astronauts around the moon and back to Earth is expected to launch no earlier than February 6, 2026.

Video shows the NASA WB-57 plane touching down with a jolt, its wings bouncing as yellow fire and white smoke bursts from beneath it.

What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

A NASA video (above) reveals in great detail how its upcoming Artemis II mission is expected to play out. The space agency released the animation last year, but seeing that the Artemis II astronauts could be heading to the moon as early as February 6,

NASA is moving into a new phase of space exploration, with major progress across human spaceflight, science missions, and advanced technology. In just one year, the agency has launched multiple crewed and science missions,

NASA's space shuttle Challenger completed 10 missions before it broke apart during a launch in 1986, killing seven astronauts.

The first Artemis moonshot with a crew is now targeted for no earlier than Feb. 8, two days later than planned.

This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.