NASA’s first crewed mission under its Artemis programme — a journey around the Moon and back — is on track for an April launch, with officials saying on Tuesday that the timeline could potentially be advanced to February.

The space agency’s Artemis programme is the flagship US effort to return humans to the Moon, a multibillion-dollar series of missions that rivals a similar effort by China , which is aiming for a 2030 astronaut Moon landing.

Artemis 2, a 10-day flight in which a crew of four astronauts will fly around the Moon and back, is a precursor test to the agency’s first astronaut Moon landing since 1972.

That mission, Artemis 3, is a far more ambitious and complex endeavor currently planned for 2027 and involving a Moon lander variant of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.

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