The Artemis-2 crew members have set a new record for the greatest distance from Earth. According to NASA, the four-person crew achieved this by surpassing the previous record of approximately 400,000 kilometers, which was established by the Apollo 13 mission back in 1970. The astronauts are slated to continue moving further from Earth in the coming hours.
The team consists of American astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman, alongside Canadian Jeremy Hansen. They departed from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida during the night leading into Thursday aboard the Orion capsule, propelled by the Space Launch System rocket. Orion reached the point where the Moon’s gravity exerts a stronger pull on the spacecraft than Earth’s.
The mission’s flight path is comparable to a figure-eight pattern around both Earth and the Moon. Altogether, the astronauts are expected to cover more than 2.3 million kilometers before making their planned landing back on Earth in the Pacific Ocean. This mission marks several milestones: for Wiseman, Glover, and Koch, it is their second trip to space; for Hansen, it is his first. Furthermore, Koch is notable as the first woman aboard a NASA Moon mission, Glover as the first non-white person, and Hansen as the first Canadian astronaut on such a flight.
