These Artemis II Moon Photos Show a View Almost No Human Has Ever Seen

Less than a week after its launch, NASA’s Artemis II crew, traveling in an Orion spacecraft, has officially traveled further into space than any humans in history. They have reached roughly 252,752 miles from Earth, surpassing the benchmark set by the famously almost totally disastrous Apollo 13 mission, which traveled 248,655 miles from home.

Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—the crew aboard—rode the Orion on a deliberate free-return trajectory around the Moon, a path designed to use the moon’s gravitational pull to sling them around its far side and bring them home.

When the Orion came within about 4,070 miles of the moon’s surface, its communications were blacked out for 40 minutes, for one of the best reasons you can hope to lose your communications: the moon was in the way.

Artemis II: Moon Photos That Reveal ‘a View Few in Human History Have Ever Witnessed’ Land on X

While peering out their windows to soak in the views of the dark side of the moon, the crew observed meteor impacts flashing across the darkened surface, a lot like the ones I wrote about recently. The crew was also able to observe and catalog geological features, including massive craters, one of which astronaut Jeremy Hansen suggested be named “Carroll” to honor Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Taylor Wiseman, who died of cancer in 2020.

The Artemis to mission isn’t just a sightseeing tour. There were experiments abound, one of which ties directly to its travel distance. Traveling that far means leaving Earth’s radiation shielding behind. The mission is also a test of how much risk humans can endure before long-term space missions start to cause lasting health damage.

The crew will be back by Friday, April 10. If they all return home safely and all goes according to plan over the next couple of years, NASA hopes to have astronauts back on the moon by 2028, which means this record may not last long, especially with China building up its own crewed lunar missions.

All records are meant to be broken, but this one especially. As Artemis II astronaut Jeremy Hansen said while aboard Orion, “But we most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived.”

Photos from the crew’s trip have been dominating social media feeds all day. We here at VICE grabbed a few of our favorites for you to enjoy below.

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