NASA shares an exciting preview of humanity’s upcoming return to the moon

Excitement is building as NASA works to launch its first manned lunar flight in more than fifty years. The Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon, could launch as early as February 6.

NASA just released a cinematic trailer for the highly anticipated mission. You can watch it via the built-in player at the top of this page.

“We will see things no human has ever seen… forcing ourselves to explore is at the core of who we are… it’s part of being human,” one of the crew members, Victor Glover, says in the video.

Glover will fly alongside fellow NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Their Orion spacecraft will be launched into orbit by NASA’s massive SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, which arrived at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad in Florida last weekend.

After several days in an elliptical orbit, during which the astronauts will test Orion’s performance in manual control, the crew will fly on to the moon, coming within 5,300 miles of the lunar surface as it flies around Earth’s nearest natural satellite.

“We’re going to rotate the spacecraft to give you the best view of the moon in 50 years,” said Jeff Radigan, chief flight director of Artemis II. a recent NASA documentary about the mission. “We want to make sure we get the videos of the moon that all of us here on Earth want to see, and make sure all our systems work on the far side of the moon as well.”

After ten days in space, Orion and its crew will crash into the ocean at the end of a major mission that will pave the way for Artemis III, which plans to place the first humans on the moon’s surface since 1972.