Cape Canaveral, 6 April 2026 (dpa/MIA) - The crew of the Artemis 2 lunar mission has travelled further from Earth than any humans ever before, the US space agency NASA announced on Monday.

The four astronauts broke the record set in 1970 by the crew of the Apollo 13 mission at about 400,171 kilometres.

They are expected to travel even further from Earth in the coming hours.

Mission honours space pioneers

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said the mission was also intended to honour the crew's predecessors in human spaceflight.

He said the achievement should "challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived."

The crew - US astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman, as well as Hansen - lifted off on Wednesday evening aboard the Orion capsule on the Space Launch System rocket from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida.

Earlier on Monday, NASA said they had reached the moon's sphere of gravitational influence, meaning the point at which the moon's gravity has a stronger effect than Earth's.

For Glover, Koch and Wiseman, this is their second spaceflight; for Hansen, it is his first. Koch is the first woman on board a NASA lunar mission, Glover the first non-white person and Hansen the first Canadian.

Figure of eight flight path

The flight path of the Artemis 2 resembles a figure of eight around the Earth and the moon.

The four astronauts are set to cover a total of more than 2.3 million kilometres - before returning to Earth in the Pacific Ocean.

The first person on the moon was Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969. The last person to leave the moon to date was NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan, who died in 2017, during the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

In total, the United States - the only country to have done so to date - sent 12 astronauts to the moon between 1969 and 1972 as part of the Apollo missions.

Photo: Screenshot