24/04/2026
On 1 April 2026, for the first time since Apollo 17, humans left Earth’s orbit. More than fifty years later, it finally happened again.
The Orion lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 PM with four astronauts on board: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch for NASA, alongside Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency. Ten days in total. The Moon as the destination.
The full trajectory covers around 685,000 miles — a lunar flyby where the crew will carry out scientific observations before heading back to Earth. If everything goes to plan, Artemis II will push past the distance record set by Apollo 13, reaching 252,021 miles from Earth. On day six, during its closest pass to the lunar surface, the crew will get a view of the Moon’s far side that no human has seen in over half a century.
The mission’s reference cameras are a Nikon D5 from 2016 and decade-old GoPros — pretty standard for NASA. But Artemis II brings something new: four iPhone 17 Pro Max units heading towards the Moon at 25,000 mph, one per crew member.
In February 2026, NASA approved the use of personal smartphones on crewed missions for the first time, ending decades of restrictions on consumer electronics. They’re already in use: 8x optical zoom to capture the rocket stage that carried them into space, and 4K Dolby Vision video of the capsule’s manoeuvres.
No internet, no Bluetooth — the devices stay fully offline to avoid interfering with onboard communication systems.
The first images are already in: Commander Wiseman shooting Earth through the capsule window — the planet wrapped in cloud systems, a green aurora cutting through the atmosphere. The same phone sitting in your pocket, now 160,000 kilometres from home.
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