NASA's Artemis II mission has set a new distance record for human spaceflight, surpassing the mark set by Apollo 13 more than five decades ago, according to reporting by Axios.
The four-person crew crossed the previous record of 248,655 miles from Earth on Monday, eclipsing the distance Apollo 13 traveled during its emergency return journey in 1970. That record had stood for 55 years.
The milestone carried a personal moment for mission commander Reid Wiseman, who marked the occasion by naming a lunar crater "Carroll" in honor of his wife, who died of cancer in 2020.
A record born from disaster
Apollo 13's distance record was never intended to stand as an achievement. The 1970 mission was forced to abandon its planned lunar landing after an oxygen tank ruptured, and the crew swung around the far side of the Moon on an emergency trajectory to return safely to Earth. That unplanned path placed the astronauts farther from home than any humans had traveled before.
Artemis II now holds that distinction under markedly different circumstances - as part of a deliberate crewed mission designed to return humans to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time since the Apollo program ended.
More distance ahead
The crew had not yet reached their farthest point from Earth at the time the record was broken, according to Axios, meaning the mission is expected to push the new record even further before the return journey begins.
Artemis II is NASA's first crewed lunar flyby mission under its Artemis program, which aims to eventually return astronauts to the lunar surface. The flight is testing the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System under crewed conditions ahead of future missions planned to include a Moon landing.
The crew includes Wiseman alongside NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen - making it an international mission and the first to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.
