Northrop Grumman works on HALO, the main central module of the now-sidelined Gateway lunar space station. Credit: Northrop Grumman NASA will shelve its plan for a small lunar space station in favor of building a base directly on the moon.

The crew’s Orion capsule entered what’s known as the lunar sphere of influence at around 12:41 a.m. ET Monday, crossing into the region of space where the moon’s gravitational pull is stronger than the pull of Earth’s.

As the Artemis II crewed moon mission soars deeper into space than humans have traveled in decades, back on Earth, the White House has proposed slashing NASA’s budget.

At this point, the Artemis II crew will be headed out toward the moon. Here's what the astronauts are doing during day three.

In an on-going overhaul of NASA's Artemis program, agency officials say it will take seven years to build a sophisticated base on the moon.

On March 3, 1969, Apollo 9 launched three astronauts on the first crewed test flight of NASA’s lunar module, which astronauts later used to land on the moon. Astronauts James McDivitt, David Scott and Rusty Schweickart orbited Earth for 10 days.

Many things have changed since the 1960s. At 13:24:59 Central Standard Time on December 19 1972, the Apollo 17 command module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, about 350 nautical miles south-east of Samoa, concluding the last mission to the Moon.

The Artemis II crew is almost at the moon, and the astronauts spent this weekend carrying out preparations for their lunar flyby on Monday. That included manual piloting demonstrations, reviewing their science objectives for the six-hour observation period and evaluating their space suits,