🚀 Mission Profile & Objectives • Crewed lunar flyby: Four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch (NASA) and Jeremy Hansen (Canadian Space Agency) — will journey around the Moon and back on a ~10-day mission.  • Hybrid free-return trajectory: Orion will ride a path that uses the Moon’s gravity to loop back to Earth — a fail-safe technique that minimizes propulsive demands.  • Record deep-space travel: The crew will travel thousands of miles beyond the lunar far side, farther than humans have gone since Apollo.  • Systems validation: Life-support, communications, navigation, thermal control, and radiation shielding will all be tested in real deep-space conditions with humans onboard.  • Proximity operations demo: Before heading to the Moon, astronauts will perform manual control and rendezvous exercises using the SLS upper stage as a target — a rehearsal for future docking near lunar orbit.  🧬 Why It Matters for STEM Artemis II isn’t just a ride around the Moon ...