NASA’s Artemis II mission is en route for a lunar flyby, and the journey could give viewers a fresh look at space travel — with Netflix helping bring the moment to screens worldwide.
Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen lifted off on Wednesday (April 1) for a trip that takes them toward the Moon before returning to Earth on April 10.
As the flight continues to run smoothly, the crew is nearing the midpoint of the mission and will soon pass by the Moon’s far side.
During that stretch, the astronauts are scheduled to take part in a broadcast interview intended to show audiences something they don’t typically get to witness in real time.
The flyby is also being framed as a chance to challenge one of the most persistent claims about human spaceflight: the idea that NASA never actually put astronauts on the Moon.
Artemis II marks the first human journey to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 — the last Apollo mission to land on the lunar surface.
That long gap is exactly why the new mission is attracting so much attention.
The team will loop around the far side of the Moon and is expected to set new benchmarks for how long humans have traveled into deep space on a lunar trajectory.
After that, Netflix will carry NASA’s official broadcast, allowing viewers to watch the coverage as it happens.
For decades, some have argued that the Moon landings were staged, suggesting the footage was produced under controlled conditions — from film sets to more modern claims involving simulated weightlessness.
One of the earliest figures tied to the modern version of the hoax narrative was Bill Kaysing, a former US Navy officer who later worked as a technical writer for a company involved with NASA’s Apollo-era efforts. He argued that the agency falsified the landings and claimed to have insider awareness of how it was done.
In 1976, he published We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, which alleged NASA was unable to deliver on President John F. Kennedy’s 1960s goal. The book claimed astronauts were sent only to Earth orbit, while lunar “landings” were filmed in a studio to help the US claim victory in the Cold War space race against the Soviet Union.
Since then, the idea has continued to circulate, with people scrutinizing NASA imagery, debating technical capabilities, and insisting that humans have never truly traveled beyond Earth’s orbit — a claim that would imply modern space missions are also fraudulent.
What you make of those arguments is up to you, but a live broadcast from a crew looping around the Moon may help some viewers decide whether what they’re watching looks like deep space — or something more artificial.
You can watch the stream in North America at 10:00 AM PT, 11:00 AM MT, 12:00 PM CT, or 1:00 PM ET.