Artemis 2 Sends Four Astronauts Beyond Low Earth Orbit for First Time in 53 Years — Under a Legally Contested Framework
The crew of Artemis 2 is not going to land on the Moon. But they are going somewhere humans have not been in 53 years: deep space. Four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — are looping toward lunar space in an Orion capsule, carrying a governance framework 55 nations have signed and two major spacefaring powers have explicitly rejected. Russia and China have not signed the Artemis Accords.
The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that launched them from Kennedy Space Center on April 1 at 6:35 p.m. EDT carried four RS-25 engines: E2047, E2059, E2062, and E2063. One of them, E2063, was replaced with E2061 in April 2025 after a hydraulics leak in an oxygen valve; the mission flew. The infrastructure meant to support a sustained lunar presence did not: NASA canceled the Lunar Gateway station in March 2026, leaving the Moon's orbital neighborhood without a planned waypoint.
The flyby window opened April 6 at 2:45 p.m. EDT and runs until 9:40 p.m. At closest approach, approximately 4,066 miles above the lunar surface, the crew will be further from Earth than any human since Apollo 13's 248,655-mile record in 1970. This mission will max out at 252,757 miles. They will spend roughly 40 minutes on the far side, starting at approximately 5:47 p.m. EDT, with no communication to ground control.
One hardware demonstration worked as intended: Orion's laser communications system transferred more than 100 gigabytes of data during the mission's first days, a step up from the analog-era systems Apollo flew. Whether the rest of the architecture holds together, and whether the legal scaffolding does, will determine whether this is remembered as a milestone or a liability.
Principle 9 of the Artemis Accords, the framework NASA and the State Department have spent years getting other governments to sign, establishes "safety zones" around lunar activities, where signatories agree to notify and coordinate with each other. According to a pre-print submitted for peer review from the Open Lunar Institute, these zones are "controversial because their implementation could violate the non-appropriation principle or other clauses of the Outer Space Treaty." That 1967 principle holds that no nation can claim celestial territory as its own.
Russia and China have not signed the Accords. No international court has ruled on whether the safety zone concept complies with the Outer Space Treaty. The two largest spacefaring powers outside the Artemis framework are operating on a different legal basis. If a Chinese or Russian lunar activity conflicts with a U.S.-declared safety zone, there is no agreed mechanism for resolving it. China's state-run space program has a published goal of a crewed landing around 2030. The Artemis Accords were designed in part to establish norms before that timeline arrives.
Artemis 2 is scheduled to return to the Pacific Ocean on April 10, completing a 10-day mission that NASA has called the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The next step, actually landing astronauts, depends on SpaceX's Starship vehicle completing the human landing system it was contracted to provide. The step after that depends on whether the governance model holds.
The Moon is governed by a treaty written before private companies could bid on its surface. No one has tested whether the Artemis Accords change that.
