The Moon is REALLY FAR AWAY. Diagrams usually cheat by showing it much closer and bigger than it really is.

This one doesn’t. Everything is to scale, including the Earth, the Moon, and the distance between them.

April 07, 2026 - 00:08 UTC

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The previous record was held by Apollo 13, the ill-fated mission where an oxygen tank exploded part-way to the Moon. They had to do an emergency loop around the far side of the Moon, taking them 400,171 km above sea level.
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Artemis II went ever-so-slightly higher, at 406,771 km.

But the reason why these two missions were record-setting is to do with an interesting quirk of the Moon’s orbit…
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