Farthest distance from Earth reached by humans

What to remember

At 23:02 UTC on 6 April 2026, four astronauts found themselves farther from Earth than anyone before: 406,771 km (252,756 mi). The Artemis II crew, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman, reached that point during their lunar flyby.

Spaceflight records split broadly into crewed and uncrewed categories. This one belongs to the first, and to a tradition of firsts carried over from aviation and sharpened by the Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

The milestones of that era show the scale. In 1957 Sputnik 1 became the first artificial satellite in orbit; in 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space; in 1969 Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon with Apollo 11. The Artemis II distance joins those milestones, measured not at the lunar surface but at the farthest point of the flyby.