NASA officials on Tuesday said the agency’s first crewed flight in its Artemis program -— a trip around the moon and back — is on track for launch in April and could potentially be moved up to February.

The space agency’s Artemis program is the flagship U.S. 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.

Artemis 2 involves NASA’s Space L

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