Brendan Mahon
Imagine you're standing on a planet and you throw a baseball. The harder you throw it, the farther it goes before gravity pulls it down. If you throw it hard enough, the ball falls around the planet instead of falling onto it. That's orbit — perpetually falling and perpetually missing the ground.
Click the rocket to launch!
Artemis II will send four astronauts around the Moon and back — the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 in 1972. Watch the spacecraft trace its free-return trajectory from Earth orbit to a lunar flyby and home again.