The Artemis II mission that will take a crew of astronauts around the moon and back to Earth is expected to launch no earlier than February 6, 2026.

Video shows the NASA WB-57 plane touching down with a jolt, its wings bouncing as yellow fire and white smoke bursts from beneath it.

A NASA video (above) reveals in great detail how its upcoming Artemis II mission is expected to play out. The space agency released the animation last year, but seeing that the Artemis II astronauts could be heading to the moon as early as February 6,

ABC News’ Elizabeth Schulze spoke with two former NASA scientists who say they are concerned about a potential safety issue with the Artemis II spacecraft ahead of its highly-anticipated launch.

NASA's space shuttle Challenger completed 10 missions before it broke apart during a launch in 1986, killing seven astronauts.

What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. NASA’s best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot.

But unlike the later Apollo missions, Artemis II will not land on the moon; it will be a test flight around the lunar body ahead of Artemis III, which “aims to someday land astronauts near the moon’s South Pole,