NASA has reinvigorated the race to put man on the Moon, nearly half a century after its historic Apollo missions. The first stage of the Artemis program, which concluded in 2022, marked the first flight test of NASA's Deep Space Exploration Systems: the Orion spacecraft and the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. It was an uncrewed mission, but with the Artemis II mission, four astronauts will embark on a journey around the Moon. The overarching goal of the second stage is to prove that the exploration system is ready to take humans to the Moon, Mars, and beyond for deep manned exploration. "Their mission will be to confirm all of the spacecraft's systems operate as designed with crew aboard in the actual environment of deep space," says the agency