Has Artemis II shown we can land on the Moon again?

Nasa's Artemis II mission has passed every major test since its launch on 1 April, with its rocket, spacecraft and crew performing better than engineers had dared to hope for.

The mission's first six days have shown that the Orion capsule works as designed with people on board for the first time - something no simulator could prove.

Perhaps its greatest achievement, though, is through the actions of the Artemis crew, which have generated hope, agency and optimism for a world appearing to be in desperate need of inspiration.

But the bigger question remains - is a Moon landing by 2028, as Nasa and President Trump want, now really an achievable goal?

What Artemis II has taught us so far

A few days after Nasa's Space Launch System (SLS) reached the launch pad at Kennedy Space Centre, the most important lesson about Artemis II had already been learned.

After two scrubbed launches in February and again in March because of separate technical issues, Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman said "launching a rocket as important and as complex as SLS every three years is not a path to success."

The previous uncrewed Artemis I mission took off in November 2022.

The agency, he said, had to stop treating each rocket "like a work of art" and start launching with the frequency of a programme that means serious business.

It was, in effect, a declaration that relearning the same lessons every three years had to stop.

That matters, because it reframes everything that has followed. And judged against that ambition, what has the mission shown us in the six days since Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen lifted off on April 1st?

The short answer is more than even the optimists dared hope for.

A Rocket that did the job

The SLS generated 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and, by every measure engineers care about, performed to plan. Each phase of the ascent was, in the understated language of mission control, "nominal": maximum dynamic pressure, main engine cut-off and booster separation.

Two of the three planned course corrections on the way to the Moon were scrapped because the trajectory was already so accurate they were not needed. As Dr Simeon Barber, space scientist at the Open Univertsity, put it: "Credit to them - they got it right the first time."

About 36 hours after launch came the critical moment. Orion fired its main engine for five minutes and fifty five seconds - known as the translunar injection burn - putting the spacecraft on a looping path to the Moon with no further major manoeuvres required.

The powerful engine burn was "flawless" according to the head of the Artemis programme, Dr Lori Glaze.

The official purpose of this mission is to put people inside Orion and find out what happens - not just to the spacecraft, but to the interaction between crew and machine. What has unfolded is precisely what was anticipated, and precisely what could not have been learned in a simulator.

There have been toilet problems. A water dispenser issue requiring the crew to bag water as a precaution. A minor redundancy loss in one of the helium systems was mentioned at an early press conference and quietly resolved.

As Barber observed: "This is all about putting humans in the loop - these pesky humans that press buttons and breathe carbon dioxide and want air conditioning and want to use the toilet. It was all about how the system works with those guys on board."

The engineers monitoring Orion's CO2 removal system through back-to-back exercise sessions, or testing how the spacecraft handles with thrusters deliberately disabled, are building the case that this vehicle is safe enough to carry people to the surface of the Moon.

Barber's overall assessment was direct: "Orion itself seems to have worked pretty well, actually - certainly all the propulsion stuff, which is the real critical stuff."

Great science or Nasa hype?

NASA has talked up the scientific returns. The crew made extensive observations during their flyby - around 35 geological features noted in real time, colour variations that could reveal mineral composition, and a solar eclipse from deep space that pilot Victor Glover said "just looks unreal."

One image stood out: the Orientale basin, a 600-mile crater near the Moon's far side, seen in full by human eyes for the first time.

And yet the science is not the main point. Professor Chris Lintott of Oxford, co-host of The Sky at Night, was blunt: "The artistic value of the images returned from Artemis and its crew is significant, but their scientific value is limited."

India's Chandrayaan-3 landed near the south pole in 2023. China's Chang'e-6 retrieved samples from the far side in 2024. Robotic probes have mapped this terrain in extraordinary detail.

The most affecting moment came not from any instrument, but from the crew. As the astronauts broke the distance record set by the stricken Apollo 13 crew in 1970, Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen called down to Mission Control in Houston.

There was a crater, he said, on the nearside-farside boundary - a bright spot to the northwest of Glushko crater.

"We lost a loved one," his voice thickening. "Her name was Carroll - the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie. And we would like to call it Carroll." Forty-five seconds of silence followed. Commander Reid Wiseman wept. The crew embraced. Back on Earth, his daughters were watching from Houston.

That moment matters for reasons beyond sentiment.

Space programmes that cannot generate genuine, unscripted human emotion do not survive long. The reason Apollo endures in cultural memory is not solely the engineering; it is what it said about human reach and courage.

Artemis II, in that moment, made the same claim.

The mission is not over. Orion is heading home, due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on 11 April.

What remains is re-entry into Earth's atmosphere - the moment that caused so much anxiety after Artemis I, when unexpected heat shield damage triggered an investigation that delayed this mission by more than a year. The Orion capsule will hit the atmosphere at roughly 25,000 mph (40,000km/h).

That is the test no simulator can replicate, and its outcome will define this mission's legacy more than any image of the Moon's far side.

If re-entry goes well, the picture that emerges from Artemis II will be genuinely encouraging. The rocket worked. The spacecraft worked. The crew handled the systems with competence and grace. And Nasa has at last articulated a credible plan to build on this moment rather than wait three years and start again.

A Moon landing by 2028 remains a stretch. Barber's instinct is that it is more like three to four years away, and that judgement is hard to argue with.

But the smoothness of this mission - from launch to lunar flyby - has shifted the probability in the right direction. The question is no longer whether Orion can fly. The question is whether the landers, the cadence, and the political will can keep pace. The spacecraft, at least, has done its part.

Artemis II a story of inspiration and a story of science. The events of last night had echoes of the Apollo programme. At a time when this world has not enough optimism, just as there was so little in the 1960s with wars across the world and civil unrest at home in the US, this was a moment in time when we could for one night remember that we are one. We can see that picture of the Earth.

This is not the end of the story by any means, this is just a test flight for an eventual landing on the Moon - not just one, but many more to come.