Artemis II: Preparing to Return to the Moon

On 1 April 2026, four astronauts climbed aboard a spacecraft named Integrity and pointed it at the Moon. It was the most ambitious human spaceflight in more than half a century — and this is its complete story.Artemis II: Preparing to Return to the Moon takes you inside every dimension of a historic ten-day mission: the decades of engineering effort that built the most powerful rocket ever to fly operationally; the political battles, false starts and near-disasters that nearly stopped it before it began; the heat shield controversy that kept NASA engineers awake at night; and the four extraordinary individuals — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — who strapped themselves to the top of it all and dared.Written for the general reader but packed with technical depth, this is the account that puts you in Mission Control, in the cockpit, and 1.1 million kilometres from home. It asks not just what happened, but what it means — for science, for humanity, and for our future among the stars.Humans have always been explorers. Artemis II proved we still are.