At three minutes to 6pm on April 6 2026, the Artemis II capsule and its freight of living, breathing astronauts reached a point 406,778km from Earth, the furthest from our blue planet that humans have ever gone.
The previous record was held by the crew of the ill-fated Apollo 13, whose lunar module touched 400,171km at the apex of a slingshot manoeuvre designed to bring the damaged spacecraft back home.
Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell knew the day was coming when Artemis II would break the record as it orbited the far side of the moon. On Monday, Nasa mission control beamed up to the Artemis crew a message that Lovell had recorded before he died last August aged 97.
“Hello, Artemis II, this is Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell. Welcome to my old neighbourhood,” he said.
At the time of their lunar flyby, Lovell and his crew were five hours into a life-threatening crisis caused by an explosion in an oxygen tank, giving the world Lovell’s immortal phrase: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here …”
The lunar landing was scrapped and the world, already bored with the Apollo programme, tuned in en masse to see if the three spacemen would make it back to Earth alive.
It’s worth noting that at the time of the Apollo 13 drama in April 1970, Richard Nixon was president and the US was embroiled in a boots-on-the-ground war in Vietnam, which had by then cost more than 41,000 American lives and killed several hundred thousand Vietnamese.
Nixon’s approval rating among the American people at the time was hovering around 50%. Then again, by then he was trying to get his country out of a war instead of into one.
Back to Artemis II, whose crew are due to splash down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10, where the problem is on our spinning Earth and not half-a-million kilometres away in the yawning emptiness of space.
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