Artemis II Crew Tops Apollo 13 Distance Record in Moon Flyby

HOUSTON, Texas — NASA's Artemis II crew, consisting of three American astronauts and one Canadian, approached the moon on Monday to achieve the farthest distance any humans have traveled from Earth, marking a key milestone in the agency's return to lunar exploration.

The four-member team aboard the Orion spacecraft, launched last Wednesday, was on track to surpass the previous record of 248,655 miles set by the Apollo 13 mission in April 1970. Mission Control anticipated the crew would exceed that mark by more than 4,100 miles during their six-hour flyby, passing as close as 4,070 miles to the lunar surface. Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen prepared for the event after years of training on lunar geography and recent observations of solar eclipses from space.

The mission follows a free-return trajectory, a fuel-efficient path that uses the gravity of Earth and the moon to sling the spacecraft around the celestial body in a figure-eight pattern. This approach mirrors the one employed by Apollo 13 after an onboard explosion forced the crew to abort their landing. Unlike that ill-fated flight, Artemis...