March 27: We Shall Return

On April 1, 2026 — five days from now — NASA's Artemis II mission will launch four astronauts toward the Moon for the first time in 54 years. Before they go, here is the story of how we got here — and what it means that we are finally going back.

In the early minutes of December 14, 1972, astronaut Gene Cernan stood alone on the surface of the Moon for the last time. Before climbing back into the lunar module Challenger, he knelt down and scratched his daughter Tracy's initials — T D C — into the lunar dust. Then he looked up at a half-Earth hanging in a black sky and spoke words that would echo for more than half a century: "We leave as we came, and God willing, as we shall return." No human being has been to the Moon since. Until, if all goes according to plan, next Wednesday.

From Mercury to the Moon — and Back Again

Artemis II — targeting launch no earlier than April 1, 2026 — will carry four astronauts on a 10-day free-return trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth: Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. It will be the first crewed deep-space mission since Apollo 17, the first time a woman has traveled beyond Earth orbit, the first time a person of color has journeyed to the Moon's vicinity, and the first time a non-American has done so. The mission does not land — it is a test flight, flying the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System around the far side of the Moon and returning safely to the Pacific Ocean — but it will carry human beings farther from Earth than anyone has traveled since 1972, surpassing even the record set by Apollo 13 at roughly 248,655 miles. The crew has been in quarantine since March 18. The rocket has been on the pad since March 20. The countdown has, at long last, begun.

The road from Cernan's footprints to this week's launchpad spans the entire arc of the Space Age. It began not at the Moon but in a tiny capsule barely large enough to hold one person: the Mercury program, which between 1958 and 1963 made the first Americans astronauts, racing against the Soviet Union to prove that human beings could survive in space at all. Alan Shepard became the first American in space on May 5, 1961 — just 15 days after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space for the Soviets. Then came Gemini — two-person missions that tested the rendezvous and spacewalking skills needed to reach the Moon. Then Apollo — the program that, on July 20, 1969, placed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface while a watching world held its breath. Between 1969 and 1972, twelve Americans walked on the Moon across six missions. Then funding cuts, shifting political priorities, and a turn toward the Space Shuttle closed the door. Cernan's initials remained undisturbed in the dust.

A massive rocket on a floodlit launch pad at night, its reflection shimmering in a nearby body of water, the Moon visible high in the dark sky above

NASA's Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft sit at Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, targeting April 1 for the first crewed lunar mission in 54 years.

The world has changed enormously since Gene Cernan left his daughter's initials on the Moon. But some things endure. The initials are still there — preserved in the airless cold, undisturbed by weather or time, exactly where Cernan scratched them 54 years ago. On April 1, if the countdown holds, four human beings will ride a column of fire into the sky and arc away from Earth toward the same pale light that has drawn our eyes since before we had words for what we were feeling. Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen will not land. But they will go farther than any human being alive has ever been. They will look back at a small blue marble against the black, and they will look forward at the Moon, and for ten days the species that built Stonehenge to track this same sky will once again send its emissaries out to meet it. The promise Cernan made in 1972 is about to be kept.