COLUMN: Four people are heading to the Moon—and you can watch them right here, right now

The Flight Plan, Hour by Hour

Artemis II will not land on the Moon. Let’s make that clear right away, because there’s a lot of confusion out there. This mission is a flyby: the Orion capsule will approach the lunar surface—at an altitude of about 8,900 kilometers—before using the Moon’s gravity as a slingshot to return to Earth. A ten-day round trip. A graceful arc through space.

Why not land? Because the Artemis program is proceeding in stages. Artemis I, in 2022, sent the uncrewed Orion capsule on the same journey. An uncrewed test flight. Artemis II repeats the maneuver—but this time, with humans on board. And Artemis III, scheduled for 2028, will attempt a lunar landing.

What the astronauts do up there for ten days

We imagine floating in zero gravity and taking photos through the porthole. The reality is more intense. The crew tests every critical system on Orion under real-world conditions: navigation, long-distance communication, life support, and orbital maneuvers. Every button pressed, every procedure carried out feeds into a database that will be used for future missions. They aren’t traveling to the Moon. They’re mapping the path for those who will come after them.

And yet, between protocols, there are those moments. Those moments when Christina Koch turns her head toward the porthole and sees the entire Earth fit in the palm of her hand. Those seconds when the silence of the cosmos enters the capsule and four human minds realize, simultaneously, that they are the most isolated people of the entire species.

The real test isn’t technical—it’s political

Let’s be honest. We had the technology to fly around the Moon back in 1968. Apollo 8 proved it with computers less powerful than a middle-school calculator. What killed crewed lunar exploration for half a century wasn’t engineering. It was the budget. It’s the will. It’s the choice, repeated administration after administration, to say: “Not now. Not this year. Maybe next year.”

Artemis II is proof that “next time” has finally arrived. But no one should be under any illusions: this program remains fragile. Every U.S. election can call it into question. Every budget overrun—and there have been dozens—fuels the arguments of those who would rather invest the money elsewhere. The SLS costs about $4 billion per launch. Four billion. For a single launch.

The SpaceX Paradox

And meanwhile, Elon Musk is flying his Starship for a fraction of that price, with the stated ambition of making the SLS obsolete before Artemis III even takes off. This is the cruelest paradox of modern space exploration: NASA needs SpaceX for its future lunar missions—the Artemis III lunar lander will be a modified Starship—while knowing that SpaceX could, eventually, render the very architecture of Artemis obsolete.

Imagine building a cathedral knowing that someone across the street is constructing a skyscraper faster and more cheaply. You keep going anyway. Because the cathedral was promised. Because thousands of people have worked on it. Because giving up now would cost more—in credibility, pride, and lost expertise—than finishing it.

A Crew Made for History

Reid Wiseman, commander. Former Navy fighter pilot and International Space Station veteran. The man whose composure under pressure has become legendary at the Johnson Space Center. Victor Glover, pilot. The first African American to travel to the Moon—a fact that history will remember long after the technical details of the mission have been forgotten.

Christina Koch, mission specialist. Holder of the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman—328 days in Earth orbit. And Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist and Canadian astronaut. The first non-U.S. citizen to leave low Earth orbit. A subtle reminder that 21st-century lunar exploration will not be exclusively American.

What They Don’t Tell You About the Selection Process

These four astronauts are portrayed as serene heroes, flawless professionals. And they are. But no one talks about the dozens of others who could have taken their place. No one talks about the years of waiting, the crew reshuffles, or the successive delays that turned training into a psychological marathon. And yet, on the morning of the launch, all four were there. Ready. Not because they weren’t afraid. Because fear doesn’t make decisions for them.

Apollo didn’t have YouTube

In July 1969, 600 million people watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Grainy images, crackling audio, a broadcast controlled by national television networks. You watched whatever CBS or ORTF decided to show you, whenever they decided to show it to you.

Today, anyone on Earth can open a browser and watch Orion live. No editorial filter. No imposed commentator. No schedule. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 10 days. This is a civilizational shift that we are massively underestimating.

The Democratization of the Cosmic View

For the first time in human history, the journey to another world is a spectacle accessible to everyone, continuously, and for free. A shepherd in Kenya with a smartphone can see exactly the same thing as a NASA engineer in Houston. A schoolgirl in Marseille can fall asleep watching Orion drift toward the Moon and wake up to find that the capsule has traveled several thousand kilometers overnight.

And yet, how many are actually watching? YouTube view counts are rising, to be sure. But in a world saturated with notifications, wars, climate crises, and political controversies, four astronauts on their way to the Moon struggle to compete with the latest scandal of the day. It may be the quietest tragedy of our time: we have access to the sublime, and we just keep scrolling.

The Main Feed on YouTube

The process is incredibly simple. Go to NASA’s official YouTube channel. Look for the live stream titled “Artemis II Live”—or simply type “Artemis II live” into the search bar. The stream is free, ad-free, and requires no subscription. It has been running continuously since liftoff and will continue until the capsule returns to Earth, scheduled for around April 12, 2026.

What you’ll see: exterior views of the Orion capsule captured by onboard cameras. Sometimes, Earth in the background. Sometimes, total darkness dotted with stars. Sometimes, a solar panel slowly rotating. And every now and then—this is where your heart races—a view of the interior of the spacecraft, where you can see the astronauts at work or floating in zero gravity.

The Real-Time Tracker

Alongside the video feed, NASA offers a real-time tracking tool that shows Orion’s exact position between Earth and the Moon. An interactive map, constantly updated, lets you view the spacecraft’s trajectory, its speed, and its distance from both celestial bodies. It’s simple, it’s precise, and it’s strangely addictive: you find yourself checking back every hour to see that the little dot has moved, that the Moon is a little closer, that the Earth is a little farther away.

And yet, no map, no number can capture what this journey truly means. Four people are leaving our planet’s gravitational cocoon to venture into a space where the slightest malfunction could kill them. Every kilometer traveled is one more kilometer separating them from any help on Earth.

The species that can’t seem to stay home

There is a magnificent absurdity in sending four people to skim past a gray rock 384,000 kilometers away when we haven’t yet solved hunger on Earth, haven’t yet found a cure for malaria, and haven’t yet learned to coexist without killing one another. The criticisms are legitimate. They have been since Apollo. They always will be.

But here’s what the critics consistently forget: exploration has never waited for Earth’s problems to be solved. Christopher Columbus didn’t wait for the plague to end. The Wright brothers didn’t wait for poverty to end. And the Artemis II astronauts can’t wait for humanity to become reasonable—because it probably never will.

Looking Back

The Moon’s most precious gift is not its gray surface. It is the view it offers of Earth.

In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew took a photo dubbed “Earthrise”—the rising Earth as seen from lunar orbit. That image changed the world. Not metaphorically. Literally. It helped give birth to the modern environmental movement. For the first time, humanity saw itself as it truly is: a fragile, blue-and-white speck suspended in a hostile void.

Artemis II will produce new images of this kind. In 4K resolution this time. Live. And the question isn’t whether these images will be beautiful—they inevitably will be. The question is whether we are still capable of being moved by them.

A Schedule Held Together with Scotch Tape

Let’s review the facts. The Artemis program was announced in 2017. Artemis I was supposed to launch in 2020—it launched in 2022. Artemis II was supposed to follow in late 2024—it’s now April 2026. Artemis III, the lunar landing mission, was promised for 2025—it has now been pushed back to 2028, at best. Each date is wishful thinking disguised as a schedule.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s the reality of crewed space exploration in the 21st century: systems of unprecedented complexity, drastic safety requirements, budgets subject to the whims of the U.S. Congress, and media pressure that turns every delay into a scandal. NASA walks a tightrope stretched between ambition and caution.

What if Artemis III never happens?

It’s a question worth asking, even if it’s an uncomfortable one. The history of space exploration is littered with programs abandoned halfway through. Obama’s Constellation. Bush Sr.’s Space Exploration Initiative. Billions spent, prototypes built, impassioned speeches—then silence. Funding cut off. Engineers scattered.

Artemis could suffer the same fate. A change in administration. An economic crisis. An accident—something no astronaut will say out loud but that everyone carries within them. And yet, it is precisely this fragility that makes Artemis II so precious. It is not a given. It is a reprieve. A moment of technological and political grace that may never happen again.

The Americans are no longer the only ones looking up

While Orion races toward the Moon, China is methodically building its own crewed lunar program. The Chang’e 6 mission brought back samples from the far side in 2024. The Tiangong space station is operational. And Beijing is aiming for a crewed lunar landing before 2030—not as a vague aspiration, but as a national objective, funded, planned, and executed with a discipline that NASA secretly envies.

India landed Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon in 2023. Japan successfully carried out a precision lunar landing with SLIM in 2024. Even Europe, the eternal spectator in the great space race, is beginning to recalibrate its ambitions. The Moon of the 21st century will not be American. It will be contested.

Artemis as a Strategic Response

Let’s not be naive. The Artemis program doesn’t exist solely because humanity dreams of the stars. It exists because Washington refuses to let Beijing plant its flag on the Moon first. The 21st-century Moon race is cloaked in rhetoric about science and discovery, but its underlying driving force remains the same as in 1961: competition between superpowers.

And yet, even the most cynical motivations can produce sublime results. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry gave us Apollo. The U.S.-China rivalry may yet give us a permanent lunar base. History cares little for our intentions. It remembers only our actions.

Atmospheric Re-entry: The Final Challenge

Around April 12, 2026, if all goes as planned, the Orion capsule will enter Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 40,000 km/h. Its heat shield—the largest ever built for a manned spacecraft—will have to withstand temperatures of 2,760 degrees Celsius. The interior of the capsule will remain at room temperature. Outside, it’s as hot as the surface of the Sun.

This is the moment everyone is waiting for—and no one wants to experience. For about ten minutes, the capsule will be enveloped in plasma, cut off from all communication with Houston. Ten minutes of radio silence. Ten minutes during which no one on Earth will know whether the four astronauts are alive or dead. And then—if everything goes according to plan—the parachutes will deploy over the Pacific, and the capsule will splash down.

What the heat shield has already proven

During Artemis I in 2022, Orion’s heat shield withstood an uncrewed reentry into the atmosphere. It worked. But the post-flight inspection revealed unexpected erosion—pieces of ablative material that had broken off unexpectedly. NASA spent months analyzing the phenomenon, modeling it, and concluding that the risk remained acceptable.

Acceptable. That is the word four families must accept. That is the word on which the lives of four human beings rest—lives that, at this very moment, are hurtling toward the Moon at thousands of kilometers per hour, perhaps watching the Earth grow smaller through their portholes.

The Trap of Habit

The first space shuttle launch in 1981 captivated the world. By the twentieth, no one was watching anymore. By the hundredth, we had forgotten how extraordinary it was. And then the Challenger exploded, and the world remembered—too late—that every launch was an engineering miracle teetering on the edge of the abyss.

Artemis II has the privilege and the curse of being a first. The first crewed mission to the Moon in the 21st century. The first crew of such diverse backgrounds to leave low Earth orbit. The first continuous live broadcast of a lunar journey. Everything is new, everything is historic, everything deserves our attention. But attention is a scarce resource, and we squander it with a profligacy that would make the Apollo astronauts weep.

The invitation still stands

The live feed is here. Right now. Not tomorrow. Not “when I have time.” The Orion capsule is heading toward the Moon at this very moment, as you read these lines. Four humans are breathing inside a metal box in the midst of the most hostile vacuum our species has ever faced. And a camera lets you see them.

Fifty years from now, someone will ask you, “When the first astronauts of the 21st century went to the Moon—were you watching?”

You still have ten days left to be able to answer “yes.”

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost