Overview
- NASA lists an earliest opportunity in early February 2026 with additional windows into April for a Launch Complex 39 liftoff at Kennedy Space Center, pending final tests and readiness.
- The crew comprises NASA astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
- Orion will circle the Moon without landing to evaluate navigation, communications and life-support systems during the roughly ten-day mission.
- The flight is designed as a free-return trajectory that uses lunar gravity to swing the spacecraft back toward Earth, a safety profile similar in principle to Apollo 13.
- NASA says the astronauts could become the farthest humans from Earth depending on lunar distance at arrival, and about 1.5 million public names will fly aboard on a memory card.