For the first time in 53 years, humans are on their way to the moon
By Daily Direct Team · 2 April 2026
At 6:35 pm EDT on Wednesday, a 98-metre rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and began climbing toward the moon.
Four astronauts are aboard: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — three Americans and one Canadian. Hansen, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut, becomes the first non-American ever to travel to the moon. The last time any human left Earth orbit was December 1972, when Apollo 17's crew departed for the lunar surface. That was 53 years ago. Most people alive today were not yet born.
Artemis II is a 10-day mission that will not land on the moon. The crew will swing around it — a lunar flyby — testing the hardware, the life support systems, the navigation, and the human physiology required for what comes next. Think of it as the dress rehearsal. The performance, if all goes to plan, comes in 2027 or 2028, when Artemis III will attempt an actual lunar landing.
But Wednesday's launch was not a rehearsal. It was an event.
Why this is genuinely historic
The last lunar crewed mission, Apollo 17, splashed down on December 19, 1972. Gene Cernan was the last human to walk on the moon. He died in 2017 without seeing anyone follow in his footsteps.
What launched Wednesday is not simply a technical sequel to Apollo. It is a mission that happened against a very different backdrop: a world in which China has its own credible lunar programme, in which commercial space companies have fundamentally changed the economics of launch, in which the geopolitical competition for technological prestige has returned to space with something like Cold War intensity.
NASA describes Artemis as a programme to establish a "sustained human presence" on and around the moon. The emphasis on sustained is deliberate and marks the most important distinction from Apollo. Apollo went to the moon six times and then stopped. The machinery was dismantled, the institutional knowledge scattered, the ambition quietly abandoned. Artemis is designed not to be Apollo — not a sprint to a flag-planting, but the beginning of permanent infrastructure.
Whether that ambition survives political cycles and budget pressures is genuinely uncertain. But the rocket launched. The astronauts are en route. That is no longer ambiguous.
Jeremy Hansen and what it means for Canada
The decision to include a Canadian astronaut on the first crewed lunar mission in half a century is a direct consequence of Canada's contribution to the Artemis programme: the Canadarm3, a next-generation robotic arm that will operate aboard the Lunar Gateway, the proposed space station in lunar orbit.
Hansen's inclusion is not tokenism. It is a geopolitical signal — that space exploration at the frontier level is no longer exclusively American. The Artemis programme includes contributions from ESA, JAXA, and CSA, reflecting a deliberate construction of a Western-aligned space coalition at a moment when China is developing its own lunar programme with a stated goal of establishing a base at the lunar south pole.
For Canada, Hansen's flight is a source of straightforward national pride. At the Juno Awards this week, Joni Mitchell called Prime Minister Mark Carney "a blessing" — and the national mood has an additional dimension now: the country has an astronaut circling the moon.
For the geopolitics of space, Hansen's presence signals that the competition playing out between Washington and Beijing on Earth — in semiconductors, in AI, in trade — has a clear extraterrestrial dimension. The moon is contested territory, not in the sense of anyone physically fighting over it, but in the sense of which nations will have the capabilities and the presence to shape whatever comes next up there.
What the mission will actually do
Artemis II will follow a trajectory called a "hybrid free-return," swinging out to the moon and using its gravity to slingshot back toward Earth. At its furthest point, the crew will be approximately 8,900 kilometres beyond the moon's far side — the greatest distance any human has travelled from Earth. They will be farther from home than any person in history.
The mission tests the Orion capsule's life support systems, its heat shield, its communication systems, and critically, how human bodies respond to deep space radiation beyond the protection of Earth's magnetic field. Apollo missions were short enough that radiation exposure was manageable. A sustained lunar programme, and any eventual Mars mission, requires much better data on what extended exposure does to the human body.
The crew will also conduct experiments on perception, navigation, and cognitive performance in the deep space environment. None of this is glamorous in the way of moon landings. All of it is essential groundwork.
A launch in the middle of everything else
There is something worth noting about the timing.
On the same day that four humans climbed into a rocket and flew toward the moon, President Trump delivered a primetime address to the nation that was described by a former senior naval officer as "embarrassing and incoherent." Oil prices surged past $115 a barrel. The DHS shutdown entered its sixth week. The NHS doctor strike in the UK continued. Gaza. Lebanon. The ongoing, grinding pressure of a world in multiple states of crisis simultaneously.
Space launches happen regardless of the news cycle. The Artemis II rocket did not wait for a quieter week. It launched when it was ready, into a world that was producing its usual volume of catastrophe and noise.
There is something clarifying about that. The Artemis II mission will take approximately 10 days. During those 10 days, four human beings will be farther from Earth than anyone has been since 1972. The wars will continue. The markets will move. The political arguments will grind on.
And four people will be circling the moon, looking back at a planet that — from 8,900 kilometres past the lunar far side — fits behind a human thumb.
What comes next
If Artemis II succeeds, Artemis III follows — a landing attempt. The target is the lunar south pole, where permanently shadowed craters are believed to hold water ice that could be converted into rocket fuel, drinking water, and oxygen. Water at the south pole is the resource that makes a sustained lunar presence physically viable rather than theoretically imaginable.
Beyond that: the Lunar Gateway, a space station in lunar orbit. Then, at some point in the 2030s, Mars — though Mars is so far away in every sense that naming a date is presently an act of imagination rather than planning.
What is not imagination, as of Wednesday, is that humans are on their way to the moon again. The first generation that has lived its entire life in a world where no one goes beyond Earth orbit is ending.
The next generation may grow up in a world where they do.
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