Artemis II Astronauts Break 2 Distance Records at Once

Four astronauts just became the most isolated humans in history, and the person farthest from them was orbiting Earth.

When the Artemis II crew flew around the moon on April 6, they reached 252,756 miles from Earth. That shattered the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, making Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen the farthest-traveled humans ever.

But astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell wondered something nobody else had asked: which humans were they farthest from? The answer turned out to be more interesting than anyone expected.

While the Artemis II astronauts circled the moon, 10 other people were in space. Seven crew members were aboard the International Space Station, and three Chinese astronauts were on the Tiangong space station.

McDowell grabbed publicly available data and got to work. He first calculated the crew's antipode, the point on Earth directly opposite them at their maximum distance. That turned out to be a remote patch of the Atlantic Ocean.

But then he realized the real answer wasn't on Earth at all. Both space stations orbit Earth quickly, and they'd recently passed near that Atlantic point.

McDowell ran calculations accounting for different spacecraft clocks, relativity effects, and Earth's orbital shifts. The math revealed something remarkable: China's Tiangong space station was slightly farther from the Artemis II crew than the ISS, at distances of 260,777 miles and 260,738 miles respectively.

Why This Inspires

The record holders on the Chinese side are astronauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang. They launched in October 2025 and had no idea they were making history that day.

McDowell notes this moment represents a shift in how we think about space exploration. "It raises the idea of a time when we're not so much asking, 'How far are people from Earth?' but 'How far are people apart?'" he explains.

The Artemis II crew returned safely to Earth on April 10. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman praised them for pushing "human exploration farther than ever before."

As more missions venture beyond Earth orbit, records like this one probably won't last long, but they mark something profound: humanity is beginning to scatter across space in ways our ancestors never imagined possible.